Aura

How to spell aura

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce aura

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does aura mean?

1. nounA distinctive quality or atmosphere that seems to surround a person, place, or thing.
2. nounA warning sensation, such as flashing lights or an odd smell, that precedes a migraine or seizure.

Aura in a sentence

• The old courthouse had an aura of quiet authority.

• She sees flickering lights as the aura before a migraine sets in.

• The new manager carried an aura of calm confidence into every meeting.

• The neurologist asked whether he felt any aura before the seizure.

Where does aura come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes straight from the Latin aura, meaning a 'breeze' or 'breath of air', which the Romans had themselves taken from the Greek aura, carrying the same sense of a gentle moving air. In its earliest English use, picked up through scholarly Latin in the late Middle Ages, it described a literal subtle vapour or exhalation thought to stream off a body. Over the centuries that physical 'breath' softened into something figurative: by the early 1700s an aura meant the distinctive atmosphere or quality felt to surround a person or place, as if an invisible air clung to them. Nineteenth-century medicine borrowed it again for the strange sensation, a flicker of light or a smell, that warns of an approaching migraine or seizure, neatly echoing the original notion of something faint drifting ahead of the main event. The spelling stays close to its Latin parent, which is why it keeps the trailing -a rather than an English -er, and why it is so easily muddled with the unrelated 'aural' meaning of the ear.

How the word is built

• aura (from Latin and Greek aura: breeze, breath); a single unanalysable root borrowed whole, no prefix or suffix