O wynd of grace, now blowe into my saile, / O auriat lycour of Clyo, for to wryte / Mi penne enspire of that I wold endyte.

And those who husbanded the Golden Grain, / And those who flung it to the Winds like Rain, / Alike to no such aureate Earth are turn'd, / As, buried once, Men want dug up again.

[CANADIAN] DOLLAR Weight: 7.000 g. Comp[osition]: Aureate-Bronze Plated Nickel Ruler: Elizabeth II Obv[erse]: Young bust right Obv. Des[igner]: Arnold Machin Rev[erse]: Loon right, date and denomination below Rev. Des.: Robert R. Carmichael Shape: 11-sided Size: 26.5 mm.

It may, then, be said that aureate terms were those new words, chiefly Romance or Latinical in origin, continually sought, under authority of criticism and the best writers, for a rich and expressive style in English, from about 1350 to about 1530.

In the only monograph on the subject, John Cooper Mendenhall describes aureate terms as "words designed to achieve sententiousness and sonorous ornamentation of style principally through their being new, rare, or uncommon, and approved by the critical opinion of their time." Since the time of Lydgate, who named these loan words and neologisms "aureate terms" to denote their linguistic gilding, Latin or Latinate words were considered the prime examples. However, readers who found aureate terms pretentious began to call them inkhorn and inkpot terms, both references to the receptacles scholars carried to hold ink.

Aureate vocabulary is derived largely from Latin, although some words have a French basis; it was devised as a 'high' or 'elevated' poetic diction used for special ceremonial or religious occasions. Perhaps the best-known practitioner of aureate diction in the late ME period was the poet John Lydgate (c. 1370–1449/1450), monk of Bury St Edmunds, court poet and self-styled disciple of Chaucer. Something of the flavour of Lydgate's aureate verse may be captured in the following extract from his A Balade in Commendation of Our Lady (a poem, incidentally, where Lydgate calls for aid from the auriat lycour of the muse Clio – Lydgate seems to have been the first English writer to use the term 'aureate').

[…] [Stephen] Hawes is the climax of the fifteenth-century kind of aureate diction: after him, nothing was possible but reaction, ridicule, and the creation of a new kind. We have so far tried to avoid defining the word "aureate," but it seems fair by now to describe it as a habitual use of terms which to those using them seemed "wonder nyce and straunge" [Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, bk. 2, l. 24].

Aureate

Meaning

Adj