Where does the word “aura” come from?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the “wind.”

Aura is one of the latest words finding prominence along the slang axis of cool vs. cringe on the grand grid of vibes. 

Emerging as an internet slang term in 2022 and spreading in 2024—especially in the social media trend of playfully evaluating how someone has gained or lost aura points—you have or give aura if you are impressive, excellent, or significant, especially if you possess a kind of breezy confidence in some manner.

Etymologically speaking, the word “breezy” is no coincidence when it comes to aura.

The etymological emanations of aura

Aura rises up from the Latin aura, meaning “breeze” and “air.” This Latin word also had a breadth of other related senses and metaphorical extensions: “breath of air, wind, odor, atmosphere, heaven, upper world,” and even “publicity.” Aura also featured in a number of expressions in Latin, including ad auras ferre, “to make known, publicize” (literally, “to carry to the winds”).

In English, early records of aura—dating back to at least the late 1300s—are true to its Latin source, signifying a “gentle breeze.” By the 1700s, we have record of aura naming “subtle emanations” of a substance (like the aura a flower gives off, although you could have also used the word to name of aura of cat pee) and in the 1800s, quite like its contemporary slang usage, the impression of your character. In short, your vibes. 

As the 1800s rounded the bend into the 1900s, aura took a theosophical turn, used by various spiritualists and paranormal partisans for a kind of essential emanation that surrounds an entity—like a force field of being. 

So, in more generalized use, your aura is the energy you give off. I’m also brought to the great German thinker Walter Benjamin’s use of aura—the distinct, authentic “presence in time and space” of a work of art—in his still-ahead-of-its-time, more-relevant-than-ever-in-our-digital-and-AI-age 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

Slang, as is so often the case, hasn’t just fallen out of a coconut tree. 

(OK, skibidi Ohio rizz is something of a masterpiece of Gen Alpha absurdist internet art. And in the specific case of aura, I also can’t help but think of a surge in interest in astrology, psychism, tarot, and other divinatory practices, which I would argue have been providing many younger people organizing principles and vocabulary to create systems of meaning in challenged world and as alternatives to traditional religion and the popular religion of work as well as in the face of a widening void in the secular religion of a shared public life as accelerated by digital fragmentation and political polarization. But that’s an essay for a different time!)

The way the word aura does—and does not—blow

The Latin aura, in turn, flows out of the Greek αὔρα (aúra), meaning “moving air” or “breeze,” especially a cool breeze or fresh air. Metaphorically, the word could refer to changeful or favorable events. 

Means “air.” Looks kind of like air. Sounds kind of like air. Is aura related to air? Maybe.

The English air comes from Latin aer (air, atmosphere, sky, weather, mist), from Greek ἀήρ (aḗr), meaning “air” and “mist” as well as “lower air,” in contrast to aether, the upper air.

The deeper origins here are airy, shall we say; some trace the Latin and Greek roots of air to a verb meaning to “raise, lift” and that ultimately yields such words as aorta and artery. 

What about aurora—is aura related to that word? Aurora rises from the Latin aurōra, referring to “dawn, daybreak, the east” in addition to naming the Roman goddess of the dawn. 

Ancient Rome had personified other meteorological elements, too, such as Auster, god of the south wind. The Latin auster, meaning “south wind,” ultimately gives name to Australia and is cognate to English’s own east and even Easter.

These Roman gods were modeled on Greek deities, including Boreas, god of the north wind—and connected to a word you encounter with aurora, aurora borealis, or the northern lights. And of course, we can’t leave out zephyr in our discussion. Zephyr was the divine personification of the west wind in Ancient Greece, blowing on over time to signify a “soft, gentle breeze” (and otherwise just swirling around as a really cool word).

The Greek counterpart to the Roman goddess Aurora is Eos, so often epitheted as “rosy-fingered dawn” in the Iliad and Odyssey. (In Ancient Greek, “rosy-fingered,” is, wonderfully, rhododáktulos. Virgil, for his part in the Aeneid, gives Aurora a rosy chariot.)

The ancient origins of this set of words —auster, Eos, east, et al.—are hypothesized to be a verb meaning “to shine.”

Nor is aura related to aural, an adjective for “hearing.” That’s from the Latin auris, meaning and related to English’s own “ear.” (And remember, oral is all about the mouth.)

Soar: plucked out of thin air

We’ve ruled out some words that resemble aura but aren’t connected, or at least with any certainty. Now, how about a word that would seem to share no historical affinity with aura but is—in one of those little delights of etymology—in fact related?

That word would be soar, “to fly or rise high in the air.” Soar flies into English from the French essorer, “to fly up,” ultimately shedding those unstressed initial and final syllables to become soar. Soar has been recorded in English since at least the late 1300s.

The French essorer develops from a Vulgar Latin verb posited as exaurare, which combines ex- (“out of”) and, here it comes, aura, “air.” Soaring, etymologically, is “out of the air.” 

Serious aura points for soar.