κόρη

κόρη (korē, "KO-ray") is the Greek word for a girl or daughter, and in this corpus it lives mostly in verse: 382 occurrences across 51 works. The Odyssey (67) and Iliad (44) lead, then Iphigenia in Aulis (32), the Theogony (24), Hecuba (17), and Helen (16) — epic and the tragic stage reaching, again and again, for the maiden, the daughter, the captured girl (LSJ marks the concubine sense too, "as Briseis").

The lexica hold the plain sense and then watch it travel. Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) glosses "young girl, daughter," and follows the word into the eye — the "pupil" — and into architecture, a carved "female figure." Frisk (Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1960–72) gives the same span, "Jungfrau, Mädchen, Tochter" ("virgin, girl, daughter"), extended to "Pupille." LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940) marks it the feminine of κόρος / κοῦρος (koros, kouros, "boy, youth"), lists the dialect forms — Epic-Ionic κούρη (kourē), Doric κώρα / κόρα (kōra) — and, capitalized, Κόρη: the Daughter, Persephone.

The etymology is genuinely matched. In Beekes's view the word grows from the root *ḱerh₂- ("to grow"), with Mycenaean ko-wo (korwos) and ko-wa (korwa) behind it. Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–80) files the lemma under a different head — κορέννυμι (korennymi, "to sate") and its "secondary and late" forms — and does not carry the girl-word's descent.

Among the cited surfaces Sophocles' Antigone leads, with five (κόρην, κόρης, κόρα), beside Plato's Alcibiades 1, Xenophon's Anabasis, Aristotle's Ars Poetica, and four in Euripides' Bacchae.

When one word holds the daughter, the eye's dark pupil, and the stone figure that bears the roof, which meaning is the girl?