Meaning
Korax is the Greek name for the raven, the large black bird the Greeks knew for its voice and its wits. From the shape of its beak the word spread to tools that hook, grip and hold.
- 1A raven or crow.
- 2A hook: a grappling iron, a hooked door handle, any tool with a curved point.
- 3The constellation of the Raven, known today by its Latin name, Corvus.
- 4In modern Greek (κόρακας): still the everyday word for a raven.
Origin
The word imitates the bird’s own call. The same croaking root runs through the Greek word for the crow and through the Latin names for both birds.
The word survives in science and anatomy:
- Corvus corax, the common raven
- coracoid, the “raven-beak” bone of the shoulder
- Corvus, the constellation
In the texts
In Greek myth the raven is the bird of Apollo, his messenger. One story says it was once white, and that the god turned it black for the bad news it carried.
ἐς κόρακας
The historian Polybius uses the word for the boarding bridge that Roman ships dropped onto enemy decks in the First Punic War: a beam with an iron spike, called the raven. Korax is also a man’s name: Corax of Syracuse is remembered as one of the first teachers of rhetoric.