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Three other “au-” words got their start with the Latin verb “augere” — “to increase.”
The most obvious is “augment,” which also means to increase, enlarge, strengthen.
Less obvious are “authority” and “auction.” The former traveled the same route as “author,” which I wrote about previously. “Authority” is the power or right to be in charge, and also can be a knowledgeable and reliable source for information.
For “auction,” its immediate ancestor was the Latin “auctio,” meaning “an increasing” and specifically “sale by increase of bids” — which is pretty much what an auction is.
A word that might seem...
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