λύκος

λύκος (lukos, "LOO-koss") is the Greek word for the wolf, and the record shows it living a modest, even life across the corpus: 72 occurrences in 37 works. No single text hoards it. Three share the lead at seven each — Epictetus's Discourses, Herodotus's Histories, and the Iliad — then Plato's Republic (4), Plotinus's Enneads (3), and the Odyssey (3). The wolf runs through epic, history, philosophy, and Neoplatonism alike, never settling into any one of them.

The lexica agree on the plain sense and then fan out into its odd second lives. LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940) gives "wolf," with the Homeric surfaces — the "grisly" (πολιός, polios) wolf of Iliad 10.334, the "raw-eating" (ὠμοφάγοι, ōmophagoi) wolves of 16.156. Frisk (Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1960–72) glosses it simply "Wolf" (German for wolf), but records that the same word named a kind of daw (a small crow), a fish, and even "Haken, Angel" — "hook, sting." Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) carries the same strange spread, glossing the metaphorical sense "hook, sting" (in Plutarch and Pollux). Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique, 1968–80) files it curtly as "m[asculine], loup" — French for wolf.

On the root, three authorities are matched in the record. Beekes and Frisk both point to the reconstructions *luha- and *luko-, and Frisk's own note aligns λύκος with Sanskrit vṛka- and Tocharian B walkwe, "wolf" (from *ulg*os), while flagging the consonant correspondence as not fully clean — an honestly hedged reconstruction. Chantraine treats the word at the same head but the brief matches no root candidate from him.

The wolf appears in the citable record as a figure of menace and of men: Paul's warning in Acts 20.29 of "grievous wolves" (λύκοι, lukoi) entering the flock; Aeschylus's Agamemnon 1258; Epictetus setting men among wolves in Discourses 1.23.

If the same word could mean wolf, crow, fish, and hook, which one did a Greek hear first?