the manner in which something is done or happens, and so also the manner in which a person lives
This word answers the question "how?" It does not name what is done or where it leads, only the fashion in which it is carried out. That is what keeps it apart from the word for a road or a path (ὁδός), which pictures a course someone travels. A reader who meets "way" in an English Bible is more often meeting that other word than this one.
Most of its New Testament appearances sit inside one fixed comparison, a short phrase English renders simply as "just as" or "in the same way that":
- a hen gathering her chicks under her wings
- the Egyptian whom Moses had killed the day before
- Jesus coming back exactly as the disciples watched him go
The word is doing real work in each of those, but English carries the whole comparison with a linking phrase, so the word itself leaves no trace in the translation.
The remaining uses put a quantity in front of it, so that it measures how many ways are in view rather than naming one. Paul says the Jewish people were advantaged "in every way", rejoices that Christ is preached "in every way" whether the motives are honest or not, and warns that no one should deceive the Thessalonians "in any way" at all. Nothing about the word shifts in these; only its scope does.
Once, in Hebrews 13:5, it describes a person rather than an action, and names the pattern a person's actions add up to: their settled way of living. The sentence there has no verb at all, which is why English versions supply one and reach for a fuller phrase, whether "conduct", "life", or the older "conversation", a word that once meant how someone lived rather than how they talked. Greek has words aimed more directly at that idea, including one for observable behavior among others (ἀναστροφή) and one for settled moral habit (ἦθος). Hebrews reaches instead for the everyday word and lets the setting carry the weight.