πῦρ

πῦρ (pyr, "PÜR") is fire, and in this corpus it burns most brightly not in the hearth-tale but in the treatise: 1,606 occurrences across 137 works, led by the Enneads (206), then the Iliad (114), the Timaeus (109), and the Metaphysics (68), with the Lives of Eminent Philosophers (59) and the Odyssey (55) close behind. Fire is the word the philosophers reasoned with.

LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940) marks it neuter (τό) and lays out one flame after another under the single noun: the funeral-fire or pyre; the sacrificial fire; the beacon-fire on the height; lightning; even the "fever heat" of illness. One word carries the burning of the dead, the offering to the gods, the signal, and the heat of a sickbed. Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) glosses it plainly "fire," and both lexica mark it neuter — fire named as a thing rather than an agent.

The etymology is genuinely matched: Beekes, Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–80), and Frisk (Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1960–72) all treat the word, and Beekes files it as an inherited Indo-European stem for fire, *peh₂-ur / *ph₂-uen-s. The record names the pedigree but leaves the deeper reconstruction at low confidence — the root candidates are carried, not settled.

The citable surfaces gather, oddly, away from the philosophers: every pinned attestation here is scriptural. πῦρ stands at Acts 2.19 and Acts 28.5, πυρός at Acts 7.30, πυρὶ and πῦρ at 1 Corinthians 3.13–15, and the word runs on through 1 and 2 Peter, 2 Thessalonians, and the Septuagint's Abdias (Obadiah). The record counts fire everywhere and pins it, plainly, in Acts, the epistles, and the Greek scriptures — naming the flame without telling us what it meant.

If one word is a beacon, a funeral-fire, and an altar all at once, is fire a thing or an event?