νύξ

νύξ (nux, "nooks") is the Greek word for night, and the record gives it a broad, prose-heavy life: 1,075 occurrences across 124 works. It lives first in the historians and the marching-narratives — Herodotus's Histories (102), Thucydides' History (99), then the Homeric poems, the Odyssey (67) and Iliad (65), and back to Xenophon's Anabasis (62) and Hellenica (48). Night is where armies move and ships wait; the word belongs to the men who had to reckon with the dark, not only to the poets who sang it.

The lexica agree on the plain sense and differ only in shading. LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 9th ed., 1940) marks it feminine (ἡ) and lists "night, night-season, a night," preserving the Homeric ν. ἀμβροσίη, "immortal night" (Il. 24.363). Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) glosses it simply "night" and notes how often it stands as the first member of a compound — νυκτο-μαχία (nukto-machia), a "night-battle." Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique, 1968–80) adds that the word "applies to death, to what is dark and dangerous," and keeps the phrase μέσαι νύκτες, "midnight." Frisk (Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1960–72) records the same battle-compound and the aspirated derivatives νύχιος, ἔννυχος, "by night."

The etymology is well matched here. Three pointers converge: in Beekes's view the root is *nokt-; Chantraine calls it a root-noun for night preserved across most of the Indo-European languages — Latin nox, a Germanic cognate — generally with o-vocalism; Frisk gives *nogt-. This is one of the oldest words the family holds in common, and the record lets it be said with authorities behind it.

The surfaces the record actually cites are late: νυκτὶ at 1 Corinthians 11.23 and 1 Thessalonians 5.1, and νυκτὸς through 1 Thessalonians (2.9, 5.5, 5.7) and 1 Timothy 5.5. The word's oldest home is Homer, but the passages gathered here belong to the New Testament epistles.

If νύξ is both the plain dark and the place of danger and death, which sense was the older weight?