ὄρνις

ὄρνις (ornis, "OR-niss") is the Greek word for a bird, and the record shows it living across a broad, mixed stretch of the corpus: 178 occurrences in 52 works. Its heaviest weight is in prose history and epic — Herodotus's Histories ("Inquiries") carries 24, the Iliad 18, the Odyssey 14 — then it thins into philosophy: Plotinus's Enneads ("Nine Treatises") has 9, Aristotle's Categories 7, Plato's Laws 6. The bird flies through the war-poem, the traveler's tale, the historian's page, and the philosopher's list of examples alike.

The lexica record a double life. LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940) glosses it "bird, bird of omen, omen taken from the flight," ranging over birds of prey and domestic fowls, even applied to ostriches. It preserves the Homeric similes where men are likened to birds — ὄρνισιν ἐοικότες αἰγυπιοῖσιν, "like birds, like vultures" (Iliad 7.59), and λάρῳ ὄρνιθι ἐοικώς, "like a gull, a bird" (Odyssey 5.51). So ὄρνις is at once the living creature and the sign read in its flight: one word for the thing in the air and the meaning taken from it.

Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–80) gives the word its own long entry (s.v. ὄρνις, entry #6035, pp. 839–840), dwelling on its knotty declension — the trisyllabic cases keep a short -ι-, the accusative wavering between ὄρνιν and ὄρνῖθα, "a bird" (accusative). This is the one etymology pointer the record matches: recorded, Chantraine's ground, not imported.

The cited surfaces reach across genre. Four passages of Aeschylus's Agamemnon carry the word, alongside Sophocles's Ajax and Antigone, Xenophon's Anabasis ("The March Up-Country"), and Aristotle's Analytica priora et posteriora ("Prior and Posterior Analytics"), where ὄρνιθος, "of a bird," stands among the examples. The record holds the citations and the surface forms — ὀρνίθων ("of birds"), ὄρνιν ("a bird"), ὄρνισι ("to birds") — but not the scenes themselves.

When one word holds both the bird and the omen, is the sign something the bird carries — or something the watcher lays upon it?