νεκρός

νεκρός (nekros, "neh-KROSS") is not death but the dead — the corpse, and in the plural οἱ νεκροί (hoi nekroi, "the dead"), the dead as a population. The record gives 697 occurrences across 89 works, and the distribution is martial and historical: Herodotus's Histories (68), the Iliad (58), and Thucydides's History (57) lead, followed by the tragic bodies of Euripides's Suppliants (35), Phoenissae (26), and Trojan Women (23). These later works are the plays of the unburied — the corpse as the thing that must be recovered, ransomed, given its rites.

LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940) records that in the early writers νεκρός is always of mankind, glossing it simply "corpse" and, in the plural, "the dead." Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) keeps that split explicit: "corpse, dead," and in the plural "the dead" understood as the inhabitants of the Underworld. Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–80) preserves the older, shorter form νέκυς (nekys, "NEH-kooss") beside it, the form Homer uses for the actual body on the ground.

On the deeper history the record carries pointers in all three etymological dictionaries. In Beekes's view (Brill 2010) νεκρός sits at the inherited root *nek-(u-), glossed "violent death, corpse" — the name of the dead body resting on a root that already holds both the violent death and the corpse it leaves. Chantraine and Frisk treat the word too, but the record reaches for no cognate beyond it. Among the cited passages the corpse turns grammatical: the genitive plural νεκρῶν (nekron, "of the dead") stands in the New Testament, at 1 Corinthians 15.12.

When the same word names the body on the field and the crowd of souls below, at what moment does a corpse become one of the dead?