κύων

κύων (kuon, "KOO-ohn") is the Greek word for a dog, and the record gives it a wide, working life: 517 occurrences across 84 works. It lives first where dogs are put to use. The top surface is On Hunting (86), the treatise on the chase; then the Iliad (75) and the Odyssey (41); then Lives of Eminent Philosophers (38), the record of famous thinkers' lives; the Republic (28); and the Histories (22). Hunting, epic, and philosophy: the dog runs through all three.

The lexica are unanimous on the sense. LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940) gives "dog, bitch," sorting the Homeric uses into shepherds' dogs, watch-dogs, and — most often in Homer — hounds, citing the phrase κυσὶ θηρευτῇσι (kusi thereutēisi, "with hunting dogs"). Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) glosses it "dog, bitch" and records the Mycenaean form ku-na-ke-ta, read /kunagetas/, "leader of dogs, hunter" — the word is that old, present already in the Bronze-Age tablets. Frisk (Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1960–72) glosses the derived compound as "Jäger" ("hunter"), while Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–80) adds a note on survival: κύων "n'existe plus en grec démotique" ("no longer exists in modern demotic Greek"), where the dog is now σκύλος, σκυλί (skylos, skyli, "dog") — yet κυνηγός (kunēgos, "hunter") lives on. The classical word for the animal faded; the word for its work did not.

The etymology is matched but held close. All three etymological authorities treat κύων at their headword; in Beekes's view the root is simply *kuon-. No further cognate reconstruction is drawn out in the record.

Beyond the frequency leaders, the record's cited surfaces cluster in Aeschylus's Agamemnon — κυνὸς, κύνα, κυσὶ (kunos, kuna, kusi, inflected forms of the same word) — and reach a single Κύων in the New Testament, 2 Peter 2.22.

When one word feeds the hunter's hound, the poet's line, and the philosopher's name, which meaning was ever the plain one?