ῥίον

The word is isolated within Hellenic and has no certain etymology. If it originally had an initial "ϝ-", it would recall βρία (bría, “town”) and perhaps also Tocharian B riye (“town”). The connections with Proto-Germanic *risiz (“giant”), Latin verrūca (“wart”), Proto-Slavic *vьrxъ (“top, peak”) and Sanskrit वर्ष्मन् (varṣman, “height, top”) are no better. As an alternative to all these problematic suggestions, Beekes considers the possibility that the word is of Pre-Greek origin.

Attested in Mycenaean Greek as 𐀪𐀍 (ri-jo).

ῥίον • (rhíon) n (genitive ῥίου); second declension

1. peak, summit, any jutting part of a mountain
2. headland
3. bay formed by a foreland

• Ῥίον (Rhíon)

• “ῥίον”, in Liddell & Scott (1940) A Greek–English Lexicon, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• ῥίον in Bailly, Anatole (1935) Le Grand Bailly: Dictionnaire grec-français, Paris: Hachette
• Beekes, Robert S. P. (2010) “ῥίον”, in Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series; 10), with the assistance of Lucien van Beek, Leiden, Boston: Brill, →ISBN, page 1287