a statue: a freestanding, three-dimensional figure set up to be seen
This is the ordinary Aramaic word for a statue, a solid figure shaped and set upright so that people look at it. Every time it appears it names a physical, standing object: the towering figure Nebuchadnezzar saw in his dream, made of gold, silver, bronze, iron, and clay, and the golden statue he later raised on an open plain and ordered everyone to bow down to.
The word itself says nothing about worship or hidden meaning. A statue is simply a statue; whatever surrounds it, a king's dream or a forced ceremony, comes from the story, not from the term. In the dream the figure stands for a line of kingdoms, but that reading is Daniel's interpretation of the vision, not a sense built into the word.
It is the close Aramaic relative of the Hebrew צֶלֶם, the word behind the "image of God" in the opening pages of Genesis, and it matches the Greek εἰκών that later carries "image" in the New Testament. In Daniel, though, it stays firmly concrete: a made object of metal, tall enough to loom over a crowd.