said: to put something into words on a particular occasion, the simple past of "to say"
This is the everyday verb for reporting what someone actually said. In practice it is the past tense of the common verb for saying (lego): lego rarely forms its own simple past, so this word steps in to supply it, and the two work together as one verb across the tenses. Wherever the New Testament reports that a person "said" something on a given occasion, this is almost always the word behind it.
Like its present-tense partner, it is deliberately plain and points to the content of what was said, not to the manner of speaking or the sound of the voice. The same word covers a flat statement, a reply, a question, a command, or a claim. The reader learns the force of any given saying from the words it introduces, not from this verb.
The senses below are shades of that one act of saying, sorted by the situation, not by any change in the word's own meaning. It reports a fresh statement, an answer to what someone else has said, or an instruction given to someone. They shade into one another, and many occurrences simply report speech without fitting neatly into one, so most are left in the general pool rather than forced into a category.