It is well known that the concept of to kalon in ancient Greek occurs in a wide variety of contexts. It applies to physical beauty, but it is also common in ethical contexts, where “honorable” or “noble” are often appropriate English translations, and where Cicero regularly Latinizes it as honestum. Nor does this exhaust the possible applications of the concept, to judge from the range of objects that receive the label kalon in Plato's dialogue devoted to the topic, the Hippias Major; not only gods and beautiful young women, but also horses, lyres, cooking pots, and soup ladles are described as kala, apparently without controversy. In the last two cases, at any rate, what seems to entitle them to the epithet kalon, if it is justified, is not anything to do with a pleasing physical appearance, but, roughly, their appropriateness for the job they are supposed to do. No doubt this multiplicity of possible applications is one reason why Socrates and Hippias fail to find a satisfactory definition of to kalon, and why their various attempted definitions are so extremely different from one another. Although it is a recurring contention of Socrates in Plato's dialogues that each word must have a unitary sense in all of its various occurrences, the example of the term to kalon, as illustrated by the Hippias Major, seems to put that contention into question.