Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Aura
/ˈɔːrə/noun
The disturbance of sense or feeling that warns of a migraine or a seizure, and, loosely, the atmosphere a person gives off.
The Greek roots
αὔρα
aúra
breeze, fresh air
Literally: “breeze”
Follow a root:αὔρα1 word
The story of the word
The medical sense came from a patient. Galen reports a boy who felt something cold climbing his leg before his fits and called it a breeze, aúra; the word attached to the warning phase and is still the clinical term. Migraine aura, the shimmering zigzag that eats a hole in the visual field, is now understood as a slow wave of cortical depression crossing the brain. The occult sense arrived much later, through nineteenth-century spiritualism.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
In a sentence
She gets about twenty minutes of aura, enough to get home before the headache lands.