The form is a contraction of ἀεργός, the alpha privative prefixed to ἔργον, and is attested from Homer onward. LSJ arranges the classical evidence in two directions that the New Testament preserves: of persons, not working, whether unemployed or unwilling; of things, unproductive, hence of land left fallow, of money lying without interest, and of material left unwrought. BDAG accordingly gives two senses, idle or lazy (Matthew 20:3, 20:6; 1 Timothy 5:13; Titus 1:12) and unproductive or useless (Matthew 12:36; James 2:20; 2 Peter 1:8), and glosses the Matthean ῥῆμα ἀργόν as a careless word, which keeps the debate over that phrase alive: whether the point is speech that yields nothing good, speech uttered without thought, or, given the surrounding controversy over words spoken against the Spirit, speech that does actual harm. Moulton and Milligan document the papyri, where the adjective is regular both for labourers standing without hire and for land out of cultivation, which supports reading the marketplace scene of Matthew 20 as unemployment rather than sloth. At James 2:20 ἀργή is the reading of Vaticanus and other early witnesses and is printed by modern critical editions against the widely attested νεκρά; Metzger reports the committee's judgment that νεκρά arose by assimilation to the νεκρά of verses 17 and 26, and commentators regularly observe the assonance between χωρὶς τῶν ἔργων and ἀργή that the harder reading produces. In 2 Peter 1:8 the pairing with ἄκαρπος reinforces the unproductive sense, the two adjectives contributing labour and harvest imagery to one charge. Titus 1:12 quotes a hexameter traditionally attributed to Epimenides, so γαστέρες ἀργαί is the poet's phrase rather than a coinage of the letter.