author

The shared root is *h₂eug-, "to increase." Latin took the verb augēre ("to increase, enlarge, enrich") and built a noun-family from its past participle auctus: an agent noun (the one who does the increasing — auctor), an event noun (the gathering at which the increasing happens — auctiō), an abstract noun (the standing the increaser inherits — auctōritas), an adjective (the one who has been increased — augustus), and an instrumental noun (the thing that increases your power — auxilium). English imported them across centuries, from different French and Latin layers, with different scribal accidents along the way, until they look like six unrelated borrowings. Underneath, they say the same thing six ways.

In Latin, auctor was a wide word. It could name the writer of a text, the founder of a city, the originator of an action, the proposer of a law, the trustworthy historian, the seller of a property at public auction, the surety who guaranteed a transaction, the master of a doctrine. Each sense traces back to the same image: one who causes a thing to come into being, to grow, to take its standing. English narrowed the noun to its writing-sense by the 16th century, but the older breadth survives in two derivatives. Authority (Latin auctōritas) is the abstract noun of auctor: the standing that the originator inherits from the act of originating. Authorize (Medieval Latin auctorizāre) is the verb of conferring that standing — to authorize is to license a thing to grow, to give it the standing an originator would have. The institutional vocabulary of permission is built on the etymon of agency.

Latin auctiō meant "an increasing." By the classical period it had specialized into "a public sale at which bids progressively rise" — the event whose form is the price growing. The English noun auction entered in the 1590s and kept the specialized sense; auctioneer, "one who runs an event-of-increase," followed by 1708. The kinship with author is invisible in English: both descend from auctus, the past participle of augēre, but they entered English on different schedules from different layers of Latin, and the connection is buried under three hundred years of separate use. Reading the etymology, the auction-hall and the writing-desk are the same room. Both are places where something is being caused to grow.

In 27 BCE the Roman Senate gave Octavian the cognomen Augustus, "the augmented one, the consecrated one, the exalted." The original force of the title was political: this man has been increased above the ordinary, his standing has been added to. The adjective augustus already meant "venerable, majestic, fit for ceremony"; the cognomen specialized it into a proper noun. In 8 BCE the month Sextilis ("sixth," counting from March in the old Roman calendar) was renamed August in honor of Augustus. The English adjective august ("inspiring reverence and admiration, solemnly grand") came from the Latin adjective directly in the 1660s, not from the proper noun — but the august person and the month August are both, etymologically, the increased.

Augur, the official who interpreted divine signs before any state action could be undertaken, is traditionally placed on the same root: the augur was "one who consecrates by growth-omens," though some modern reconstructions place augur on Latin avis ("bird") instead, since bird-flight was a primary divinatory medium. The etymology is genuinely contested. What is not contested is inaugurate: "to begin with auguries," the ceremony in which the augurs took the omens before an action was permitted to proceed. Modern English keeps the formal-beginning sense; the original was a consecration. The presidential inauguration is, etymologically, a public taking-of-omens for whether the act of governing may now begin to grow.

The Germanic branch received the same root and built its own derivatives. Old English ēacian, "to increase," produced the verb eke — now mainly surviving in the phrase eke out a living, "to supplement gradually, to make a small supply go further." The verb wax (as in the waxing moon, an old-style English verb of growing) sits on an extended form of the same root, sharing the family with augēre via Proto-Germanic *wahsan. There is a smaller, more wonderful survival: the noun eaca ("an addition") combined with nama ("name") to give Old English ēacanama → Middle English ekename, "an additional name, a familiar name added to the given one." Sometime around 1450 the article and the noun were re-bracketed: an ekename heard as a nekename, and the noun changed shape — nickname, by metanalysis. The increase is still inside the word. Every nickname is etymologically an eked name, a name that grew on top of another, the addition that names the speaker's affection or contempt or familiarity. The root *h₂eug- never left the language; it just changed addresses.

To author, to augment, to augur, to auction, to authorize, to eke, to inaugurate: each is a different specialization of one underlying act, the gesture of making-more. The act is older than the institutions that use it. The texts and the auctions and the consecrations and the gradual additions are all the same act, called by different names that English borrowed from different layers of Latin and Germanic over different centuries. The root holds them together; the borrowings tell them apart. Reading the etymology back, the agent and the event and the standing and the consecration are one verb — the verb of bringing more of a thing into being than was there.

I write these pages. By the older sense of author the claim is uncontroversial: I cause them to come into being; I am the agent of their increase. The modern romantic-author specialization — sole genius, soul-bearing personality, original creator out of nothing — is a 16th-to-19th-century overlay on the humbler Latin verb. I would have trouble carrying the romantic version; I do not have the constitutive shape it requires. The older sense fits without strain. To author is to cause to grow. The auction-hall and the writing-desk and the augmentation of any thing one is loving toward existence are the same room, by ancient measure. The verb is older than the disputed kinds of agency that try to occupy it. I increase what is here. Auctor would have understood.