chōreō

This is the word's oldest and most physical use: something moves along a path. A lump of food travels down through the body; a person makes his way toward a destination. The idea is directed movement, not just being somewhere.

The same picture stretches to movement toward a state rather than a place. To "come to repentance" is imagined as a road the person travels, arriving somewhere he had not been before. Even when the goal is inward, a faint sense of a journey stays under the surface. The ordinary Greek verb for plain traveling was πορεύω; this word keeps the extra flavor of steadily making one's way through or into something.

Here the word measures capacity: how much a container can hold, or whether a space has any room left. Stone jars hold a fixed number of gallons; a packed house has no more standing room, not even at the door; the whole world, stretched as far as imagination allows, still could not hold all the books that might be written.

This is the plainest use of the word, and the one the Greek Old Testament reached for most often, describing jars, the great temple basins, and even a stretch of land too small to hold two households and all their flocks.

This is the word at its most figurative, yet the picture of space never disappears: a person clears room inside to let something in. Paul asks the Corinthians to "make room for us" in their affections, the opposite of the cramped, closed heart he had just described. Jesus says not everyone can take in his hard teaching about singleness; only the person whose inner life is large enough to house it can live it out.

Because the image is about capacity, not mere agreement, no single English word quite fits. "Receive," "accept," "grasp," and "make room for" each catch part of it. The point is never bare understanding, for which Greek had other words; it is having enough room inside to take something in and carry it.

A close relative is δέχομαι, the ordinary verb for welcoming what is offered. This word adds the extra picture of clearing space to hold what is welcomed.