ἠώς

Forms

ἠώς (ēṓs) f (genitive ἠόος or ἠοῦς); third declension^[1] Attic ἕως (genitive and accusative ἕω), Doric ἀώς and ἀϝώς, also ἀϝώρ, Aeolic αὔως.^[2][3] Hesychius records a Boeotian ἄας, glossed “till tomorrow”.^[3] The Homeric locative is ἠῶθι, in the phrase ἠῶθι πρό “early in the morning”.^[3][2]

Etymology

It is inherited from Proto-Hellenic *auhṓs,^[1] inherited from Proto-Indo-European *h₂éwsōs (“dawn”), the Indo-European word for the dawn, which was also worshipped as a goddess.^[1][2] Beekes reconstructs Proto-Greek *ausṓs, which matches Latin aurōra (“dawn”) exactly except for the Latin ending; Sanskrit उषस् (uṣás, “dawn”) has the zero grade of the root.^[2][4] An *r-stem of the same root is seen in αὔριον (aúrion, “tomorrow”), Lithuanian aušrà (“dawn”) and Old High German ōstara (“Easter”).^[2]

Chantraine derives all the dialect forms from a stem with intervocalic /s/, which was lost.^[5] Attic ἕως (héōs) owes its initial aspiration to the lost /s/, according to Chantraine, or to a metathesis of aspiration, according to Beekes and Frisk; its accent on the first syllable was probably taken from the adverb ἕωθεν (héōthen), where it is regular.^[5][2][4]

Earliest recorded meaning

The word is common in Homer, both for the dawn and the daylight it spreads and for the goddess Dawn, “rosy-fingered” and “early-born”.^[6][3] In the Iliad it also counts days, as in “the twelfth dawn”, and names the east, “towards dawn and the sun”.^[6][3]

Semantic evolution

Homer already used the word in several senses: the daybreak, the morning as a stretch of time (the accusative meaning “all morning long”), a day counted as one of a series, and the quarter of the sky where the sun rises.^[6][3] The Ionic form is the Homeric and Herodotean one, while Attic prose used ἕως, in phrases such as “at daybreak” and “towards the east” in Thucydides and Xenophon.^[3][5] Late poets also used it for “life”, the light of day that the dead leave behind.^[3]

Derivatives kept the sense of morning: ἠοῖος (ēoîos) “of the dawn, eastern”, ἕωλος (héōlos) “a night old, stale” (of food), and the compound ἑωσφόρος (heōsphóros) “bringer of dawn”, the morning star.^[2][5]

The word for “dawn” disappeared from spoken Greek, but έωλος (éolos) and εωσφόρος (eosfóros) survive.^[5] Babiniotis still lists Modern Greek ηώς (iós), from the ancient Epic and Ionic form.^[7]

Timeline

• Homer – The Iliad and the Odyssey use it for the dawn, the morning, a day, the east and the goddess Dawn.^[6][3]
• Before the 6th century BC – Hesiod's Theogony names the goddess and her children.^[3][8]
• 7th–6th century BC – Sappho has the Aeolic form αὔως (aúōs).^[3]
• 5th century BC – Herodotus uses the Ionic form for the morning and for the east.^[3]
• 5th century BC – Thucydides uses the Attic form ἕως (héōs) in phrases for “at daybreak”.^[3]
• 4th–3rd century BC – Theocritus uses a Doric phrase with it for “tomorrow”.^[3]
• Modern Greek – Dictionaries list ηώς (iós) as the Epic form of the Attic word.^[7]

Meanings

Noun

1. The dawn, daybreak; the light of day.^[3][6]
2. The morning as a time of day; in the accusative, “all morning”.^[3][6]
3. A morning counted as a unit of time: a day.^[3][6]
4. The east.^[3][6]
5. (late poetry) Life.^[3]
6. (capitalised: Ἠώς) Dawn, the goddess of the dawn.^[3][9]

Word family

• ἠῶθεν (ēôthen)
• ἠῶθι (ēôthi)
• ὑπηοῖος (hupēoîos)
• ἠοῖος (ēoîos)
• ἑωσφόρος (heōsphóros)

Related words

• αὔριον (aúrion)
• ἕωλος (héōlos)
• Latin aurora

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g Beekes, Robert S. P. (2010), Etymological Dictionary of Greek, with the assistance of Lucien van Beek, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 10, Leiden; Boston: Brill
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; Jones, Henry Stuart (1940), A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
4. ^ a b Frisk, Hjalmar (1960–1972), Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3 vols, Heidelberg: Carl Winter
5. ^ a b c d e Chantraine, Pierre (2009), Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque: histoire des mots, new ed. with a supplement (Chroniques d'étymologie grecque 1–10), Paris: Klincksieck
6. ^ a b c d e f g h Cunliffe, Richard John (1924), A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect, London: Blackie and Son
7. ^ a b Babiniotis, Georgios (2010), Ετυμολογικό λεξικό της νέας ελληνικής γλώσσας [Etymological Dictionary of Modern Greek], Athens: Κέντρο Λεξικολογίας
8. ^ Keersmaekers, Alek (2021–2025), GLAUx: The Greek Language Automated corpus, https://github.com/alekkeersmaekers/glaux
9. ^ Diggle, James, et al., eds. (2021), The Cambridge Greek Lexicon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press