ktisis

This one word travels the whole distance from God's act of making the world to the world that results from it, and English has no single word that covers the same span.

At one end it names the event itself, the founding of the world, as in the phrase "from the beginning of creation." At the other end it names the finished product, everything God has made, which Paul pictures groaning and waiting to be set free. In between it can narrow to a single created thing, a creature, and it can widen again to the whole renewed order that God begins in Christ, the "new creation."

The related verb κτίζω is the act of creating, and κτίσμα is an individual created thing; this noun can mean either the act or its result, which is why the same word points at both the making and the made. It overlaps with κόσμος, the ordered world, but the emphasis differs: this word stresses that the world is something made, while κόσμος stresses the world as an arranged system.

In one place the word steps outside the language of God's creation entirely. Peter tells readers to submit to every "human creation," meaning the offices and authorities that people have set up, such as the emperor and his governors. What ties this to the rest of the word is the plain idea of something founded or established; here what is founded is not the world but a structure of human government.

Because the word normally means God's creation, translators handle this verse in very different ways, from "institution" to "authority" to "ordinance," and the older King James Bible even rendered it "ordinance of man."