aulore

Forms

aulore m (plural aulori)^[1] Old forms include Old Italian aolore, Old Italian alore and Old Italian aulor.^[2]

Etymology

It is inherited from Vulgar Latin *aulōrem (“smell”), a variant of Latin olor (“smell”).^[3][1] The TLIO compares Late Latin audor.^[2] The ⟨au⟩ is a hypercorrection, as in aulire: speakers who knew that popular speech turned /au/ into /o/ restored an /au/ that the Latin word never had.^[4][5][6] Latin olor is the pre- and post-classical form of odor, probably shaped by oleō (“to smell”).^[1][7] The regular form, without the diphthong, is olore.^[1]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is in a Tuscan copy of a poem by Giacomo da Lentini, of about 1230–1250, with the sense “pleasant smell, fragrance”.^[2] Guido delle Colonne writes E la bocca aulitusa / più rende aulente aulore / che non fa una fera / c'ha nome pantera, “and the fragrant mouth gives off a sweeter scent than a beast called the panther”.^[8]

Semantic evolution

In Old Italian the word was also said of the divine and used in sacred epithets, and it could mean any smell.^[2] DEI notes that this group of words was limited to the Sicilian poets and their Tuscan followers of the 13th century, and was partly revived by D'Annunzio.^[6] Today it is a literary word.^[3][1]

Meanings

Noun

1. (literary) Fragrance, a pleasant scent.^[3][2][1]

Word family

• auloroso

Related words

• aulire
• aulente
• olore
• Latin olor

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (1997–), Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, CNR, Firenze; tlio.ovi.cnr.it
3. ^ a b c De Mauro, Tullio (ed.) (2003), Grande dizionario italiano dell'uso, CD-ROM version 2.0, Torino: UTET
4. ^ Cortelazzo, Manlio; Zolli, Paolo (1999), Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, 2nd ed. by Manlio Cortelazzo and Michele A. Cortelazzo, Bologna: Zanichelli
5. ^ Nocentini, Alberto; Parenti, Alessandro (2010), l'Etimologico: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Firenze: Le Monnier
6. ^ a b Battisti, Carlo; Alessio, Giovanni (1950–1957), Dizionario etimologico italiano, 5 vols., Firenze: Barbèra (reprint 1975), p. 363
7. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
8. ^ Battaglia, Salvatore; Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio (1961–2002), Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols., Torino: UTET; digital ed. Accademia della Crusca, p. 1, 844