οἶκος

In the record, οἶκος (oikos, "OY-koss") is one of the most heavily attested words in the Greek corpus: 2,843 occurrences across 123 works. Its distribution tells its own story. The heaviest weight falls not in Homer but in the Septuagint — Paralipomenon II ("Chronicles," 215), Regnorum III and IV (the third and fourth books of "Kingdoms," 176 and 153), Ezechiel ("Ezekiel," 171), Regnorum II ("second Kingdoms," 113). There the word rarely means a private residence; it carries a lineage and, above all, the house of the Lord, the temple. Homer's Odyssey holds 126 of them — the estate at the center of that poem, the place the wanderer is trying to return to.

The lexicographers keep the word wide. LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940) opens with "house, any dwelling-place" and stretches it to a cave, a tent, a home. Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–80) records the fork the Greeks themselves made: οἶκος came to name the household as an economic and social whole — a patrimony — as distinct from οἰκία (oikia, "the building"). From οἶκος they built οἰκο-νόμος (oiko-nomos, "the household-manager"), and through it our word economy.

Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) glosses it "house, dwelling, home, household, native land" and, in his view, traces it to the root candidates *ueik- or *uik-. The Mycenaean tablets already show wo-i-ko-de ("homeward"), the same directional pull toward home. So the word arrives in Greek already meaning the place one goes back to.

When the word is a lineage, a temple, and a returning-place at once, which of those is a house?