This is a real problem, especially in Homeric Greek and Biblical Hebrew. One approach to figuring out what such words mean, is to go to similar words in related

This is a real problem, especially in Homeric Greek and Biblical Hebrew. One approach to figuring out what such words mean, is to go to similar words in related languages. Another is to use earlier translations (such as the Septuagint from Hebrew to Greek in the first or second centuries BCE), when the translators likely had a better sense of what the words meant.