curse

Distinctions

arur (ארור)

The Vilna Gaon: arur is the true and intense curse, which is why the Torah uses it for cursing a king. A king's powers are more overreaching than a judge's, so he can hurt a man more, the more so as kingship is commonly an inherited position and the king's moral standing is generally beside the point; a man gravely mistreated by him may be tempted to curse him in earnest and not merely to disparage him. Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg: arur is broad and all-inclusive, wishing every misfortune on an adversary, and it can stand alone (one simply declares that an arur shall come upon him); it can also fall on something abstract, not only on what physically exists. Malbim reads arur narrowly the other way: it names the practical working-out of a curse in one specific thing of the victim's, his body or his property, and he links it to me'erah, decrease (Devarim 28:20), the shrinking of a man's yield.

kelalah (קללה)

The Vilna Gaon: kelalah is colloquially "curse" but literally a diminutive, something one invokes to belittle another and not truly a curse at all, from kal, light or easy; one who utters a kelalah about another dismisses him as unimportant. The Torah uses it for cursing a judge, since the harm a judge can do a man is not usually so damaging, the more so as society always strives to appoint upright judges, and the wronged party will make do with disparaging him rather than actually cursing him. Rabbi Mecklenburg: kelalah is the specific curse and cannot stand alone; the one who curses must say in what way the curse should take effect. On his reading it applies only to something that physically exists. This is how he reads Bereishis 12:3, that whoever curses Avraham with a specific kelalah receives an all-encompassing arur from Above.

allah (אלה)

Radak: an allah is the curse in which one expressly invokes Hashem to bring the misfortune about. Rabbi Mecklenburg disagrees: an allah is a conditional curse, laid down with a stipulation, as in "whoever does such and such shall be cursed."

kavah (קבה)

Malbim: a general curse declaring a man and everything of his cursed, uttered in public with his name stated explicitly (compare the naming of Bamidbar 1:17). Arur carries no such connotation of public naming.

Rendering guidance

• Shemos 22:27: do not use "curse" twice. "A judge you shall not revile, and a prince among your people you shall not curse" keeps the Vilna Gaon's distinction; a note can carry Rabbi Mecklenburg's reading instead.
• Bereishis 12:3: "whoever curses you, I will curse" loses the pair. Render the first "whoever calls down a curse on you" and the second "him will I curse," or gloss the Hebrew.
• Arur standing alone as a declaration: "Cursed be he." Kelalah alone in a mussar context: "curse" is acceptable, but "disparagement" is right wherever the passage plays on kal.
• Allah: "oath-curse" or "imprecation," never plain "curse," since the whole distinction is that Hashem's Name or a condition is attached. In a shevuah context, "the curse of the oath."
• Trap: English "curse" absorbs all four. Where two appear in one pasuk or one derashah, differentiate; where only one appears and nothing turns on it, "curse" is fine.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Clarifying a Collection of Curses," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 17 Kislev 5777 (2016-12-17): https://articles.ohr.edu/articles/clarifying-a-collection-of-curses; raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/7049-clarifying-a-collection-of-curses.md. Primary loci: Shemos 22:27; Bereishis 12:3; Devarim 28:20 (me'erah); Bamidbar 1:17. Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg writes in HaKesav VeHaKabbalah; the Vilna Gaon, Malbim, and Radak are cited by the article without a locus beyond these pesukim.