• august •
Printable Version Pronunciation: aw-gêst • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: Regal, majestic, imposing, grandiose.
Notes: Unrelated to the hot month, August, which was named after Augustus Caesar on the Julian (for Julius Caesar) calendar. The adverb is augustly and the noun, augustness.
In Play: The Good Word today reminds us of royalty and greatness: "I first met his lordship in his august penthouse high atop London." Even though the visibility of royalty continues to melt away, the usefulness of our word today remains undiminished: "The setting of such an august cathedral for the wedding of such a pair of quiet church mice seemed oddly congruous."
Word History: You probably would not think of a nickname as anything august but these two words share the same origin. Today's Good Word goes back 5-6000 years to Proto-Indo-European *aug- "to increase". Latin retained the form intact in words like augere "to increase", which underlies our word auction. Latin auxilium (aug-sililum) "aid, support" came to us, via French, as "auxiliary". The Germanic languages did not keep the PIE root intact: as it wound its way through the ancient Germanic languages it became Old English eacan "to add, increase". Today that word is eke. Now, a nickname started out centuries ago as an ekename "an additional name" but that fickle [n] on the an changed partners along the way. Ns are like that—and they switch both ways: a napron was reanalyzed as an apron and a narange (from Arabic), as an orange.
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