χειμών

χειμών (cheimon, "khay-MOHN") is the Greek word for winter, the cold time of the year. The record gives it a solid, historian's life: 342 occurrences across 61 works. It clusters in the long prose works — histories first of all. The single largest holding is a History with 106 occurrences — nearly a third of the total in one work — followed by Histories (46), Hellenica (23), Lives of Eminent Philosophers (14), Discourses (12), and Cyropaedia (10).

The one lexicon in the record, LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 9th ed., 1940), keeps the headline gloss plain — "winter, in winter, in winter-time" — and its first, longest sense spreads that season two ways. There is winter as felt cold: "the cold weather," reaching back to the Iliad for the earliest surface, χειμῶνος δυσθαλπέος (cheimonos dysthalpeos, "of a winter hard to warm in"), the season that ἀνέπαυσεν, "gave men rest from their labors" (Il. 17.549) — winter as a stopping of work, an enforced quiet. And there is winter as measured time: "in the course of the winter," "during winter," the stretch one counts one's way through.

For the word's origin the record offers no reconstructed root and names no dated etymological authority; its one lexicon entry points only sideways, to the kindred noun χεῖμα (cheima, "winter-cold, frost"), and goes no further back.

Where the record pins particular passages, the sense stays winter. Aeschylus's Agamemnon carries the word five times over — χειμῶνα, χειμῶνʼ, χειμῶνι (563–566, 634–635, 646–649, 655–657, 968–969) — and the last of these, χειμῶνι at 968–969, the record files under its plainest gloss, ἐν χειμῶνι, "in winter." The same form surfaces in the Greek New Testament (χειμῶνος, 2 Timothy 4.21; χειμῶνός, Acts 27.20) and in Xenophon's Agesilaus (χειμῶνος, 2.31), the plain season once more.

When one word carries both the cold that gives men rest from their labor and the season by which a history keeps its count, which winter is the word's home?