κλαυθμός

κλαυθμός (klauthmos, "klowth-MOSS") is the Greek word for weeping, a wailing or loud lament, and the record shows it living a modest, dispersed life: 60 occurrences across 28 works. It clusters where grief is public and ritual. The top holdings are the prophet Jeremias (7) and Matthew (7), then Isaias (6) and the Odyssey (6), with Esdras I (3) and Herodotus's Histories (3) trailing. That shape tells its own story — the word is at home in the Septuagint's prophets and in the Gospel, but the Odyssey's six keep it anchored in the older Greek of mourning, and Herodotus lets it stand in plain narrative prose.

Only one lexicon carries it here. LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 9th ed., 1940) files it as masculine [ὁ] and, rather than define, points: to Iliad 24.717 and several places in the Odyssey, to Aeschylus's Agamemnon 1554 in the lyric plural, to Herodotus, and forward to κλαυθμοὶ παίδων ("wailings of children") in Aristotle's Politics, to the Septuagint at Genesis 45.2, and to Matthew 8.12. LSJ also preserves the phrase κ. μετὰ δακρύων ("weeping with tears") from Diodorus Siculus — the noun doubled with the tears themselves.

No etymology pointer is matched in the record — the honest gap: this brief carries no dated authority for the word's root, so none is claimed here.

The cited surfaces bear out the spread. Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1552–1559 gives the tragic κλαυθμῶν ("of lamentations"); the Septuagint supplies κλαυθμοῦ ("of weeping") repeatedly — in Baruch 4, in Daniel, in Deuteronomium 34, where the people mourn Moses. And Acts 20.37 has κλαυθμός again: Paul's friends, weeping at his going. Homer's mourners, the tragic chorus, the exiled prophets, the Gospel's threatened outer darkness — the same noun serves them all.

When one word carries both a child's cry and a nation's lament, does it name the sound or the sorrow beneath it?