to weep: to shed tears aloud, the body's open response to grief, pain, longing, or relief.
This is the ordinary Hebrew word for weeping, and it is one thing across all its uses. It does not name a private welling-up of the eyes so much as visible, audible crying, the kind that others hear and answer. The same word covers the tears of a mourner at a grave, a barren woman pouring out her ache, a defeated army, two estranged brothers falling on each other's necks, and a whole nation crying out before God. The English reader meets it as weep, cry, mourn, or bewail, but underneath it is a single act, colored by the moment it happens in.
What changes from place to place is the occasion, not the meaning. Most often the tears are grief, especially over the dead, where weeping runs alongside the formal customs of mourning. But the very same crying breaks out in distress and pleading, often turned Godward, and just as readily in joy and reunion, when people weep because they have found each other again. The word follows the feeling rather than fixing it.
Because it is so plain and so frequent, weeping in the Hebrew Bible is rarely hidden. People weep with their voice lifted up, they weep before others and before the LORD, and the tears become a kind of speech in their own right, a way of saying what words cannot carry. That is why the prophets can summon a whole community to it and why a single person's tears, like Hezekiah's or Hannah's, can be presented as something God sees and hears.