a girl: a young female, anywhere from a child to a young unmarried woman
This is the plain Greek word for a girl. In the New Testament it turns up in only two stories, and between them it stretches across a fair span of age. In one, Jesus is called to the house of a synagogue leader whose daughter has died, and he takes her hand and raises her; Mark notes that she was twelve years old. In the other, the daughter of Herodias dances at Herod's birthday feast and, prompted by her mother, asks for the head of John the Baptist on a platter.
The Greek form is a shrunken version of an older and more literary word for a girl, "kore," made with the ending Greek used for small things. By the first century that sense of smallness had largely worn off, so the word simply meant "girl," not necessarily "little girl." It also belonged to everyday speech rather than to polished writing, and Greek authors who prized the old Athenian style listed it among the words a careful writer should avoid. The Gospel writers use it without embarrassment, which is part of what makes their Greek sound like ordinary talk.
Mark's account of the synagogue leader's daughter shows how several words could name one child from different angles:
- her father calls her his "little daughter" (θυγάτριον), naming her by her place in the family
- the story calls her a "child" (παιδίον), a word that does not tell you whether the child is a boy or a girl
- Jesus calls her simply "girl," naming her by her sex and her youth
Mark even keeps the Aramaic Jesus actually spoke, "talitha koum" (ταλιθά), and then translates that first word for his Greek readers with exactly this word.