Charisma
/kəˈrɪzmə/noun
A magnetic personal quality that makes other people want to follow someone.
The Greek roots
Literally: “a thing given as a favour”
The story of the word
Paul used charísmata in his letters for gifts of the Spirit: healing, prophecy, tongues. English borrowed the word in the 1640s in exactly that sense and kept it in church for three hundred years. The modern meaning is sociology rather than theology, from Max Weber, who set charismatic authority beside the traditional and the bureaucratic kinds; English translations of Weber pushed the word into ordinary speech after the 1940s. The root cháris is the same grace that sits inside Eucharist.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Ecclesiastical Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1640s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
She had the kind of charisma that makes a room turn without her raising her voice.