ὀδούς

ὀδούς (odous, "oh-DOOCE") is the Greek word for a tooth, and the record gives it a solid, unspectacular life: 149 occurrences across 52 works. It lives first in epic — the Iliad has 21, the Odyssey 16 — then thins and scatters: the Histories (9), Matthew (8), the Psalms (Psalmi, 7), the Shield of Heracles (6), and on into ones and twos. From the start it is more than anatomy: a tooth that grinds, that bites, that aches with longing.

The single lexicon in the record, LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 9th ed., 1940), glosses it plainly: "tooth, incisors, molars." It records the anatomist's distinction — ὀδόντες ὀξεῖς (odontes oxeis, "sharp teeth"), the incisors, opposed to πλατεῖς (plateis, "broad ones"), the molars — citing Aristotle. And it preserves the two set phrases the language built: ἕρκος ὀδόντων (herkos odontōn, "the fence of the teeth") and πρίειν ὀδόντας (priein odontas, "to grind the teeth"). LSJ also catches its one flight into metaphor: γλυκὺς ὀδούς (glykys odous, "the sweet tooth") — Lucian's phrase for the tooth of desire.

These citable surfaces bear only themselves — the record carries no line of text for any, only the word and where it stands. The accusative ὀδόντας (odontas) recurs most: in Aristotle's Categories, in Euripides' Bacchae (618–620), in Acts 7.54, in Daniel (LXX) 7. Canticum (the Song of Songs) gives the nominative ὀδόντες (odontes) and the dative ὀδοῦσιν (odousin); Amos the genitive ὀδόντων (odontōn); Xenophon's Cyropaedia the singular ὀδόντι (odonti). The scene each time is withheld; the tooth is everywhere, saying only itself.

On the origin the record is not silent after all. LSJ's entry derives ὀδούς from the Indo-European root *ed- "to eat" — the root of ἔδω (edō, "I eat") and Latin edo — reading the tooth, in effect, as "the eating one," and setting beside it the cousin-languages' words for tooth: Latin dens, Sanskrit dántam, Gothic tunþus.

When the same small bone both eats and rages, which mouth did the Greeks hear first?