πτῶσις

πτῶσις (ptosis, "PTOH-sis") is a falling, a fall — and the record shows a modest but real presence: 67 occurrences across 24 works, spread thin and settling nowhere in bulk. Its top homes are Siracides, the wisdom book of Ben Sira (12); the Lives of Eminent Philosophers (8); Ezechiel, the prophet Ezekiel (7); then Aristotle's Analytica priora et posteriora, the Prior and Posterior Analytics (4); the Rhetoric (4); and Zacharias, Zechariah (4). It is a word shared out between Greek scripture and Greek logic — the prophets' word for a calamity that falls on a people, and the philosopher's word for a technical fall.

The one lexicon entry, LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940), glosses it simply "falling, fall," and lets the range open from there: the fall of dice (κύβων, kubōn, "of dice") at Plato, Republic 604c; of thunderbolts (κεραυνῶν, keraunōn, "of thunderbolts") in Aristotle's Meteorologica; of Phaethon (Φαέθοντος, Phaethontos) in Polybius. Then it turns inward — π. τῆς ψυχῆς (ptōsis tēs psychēs, "a falling of the soul"), set against ἔπαρσις (eparsis, "a lifting up, elation") in Zeno the Stoic. The soul, too, can fall or be raised.

The etymology the record carries sits inside that same LSJ entry, which points the noun back to its verb: πίπτω (piptō, "I fall") and its perfect πέ-πτωκα (peptōka, "I have fallen"). No separate dated authority for a deeper root is matched here, so nothing further is claimed.

The citable surfaces lean philosophical. Aristotle turns πτῶσις over and over in the Analytics — πτώσει, πτώσεων, πτῶσιν, πτώσεις (the oblique and plural forms of the noun itself) — and again in the Ars Poetica, the Poetics, at chapter 20. The Septuagint supplies the other pole: πτώσει (ptōsei, "in the fall") at Baruch 4 — a fall already come upon a city.

If one word carries both the dice's fall and the soul's, is falling one thing the Greeks saw everywhere, or many things wearing one name?