What Does August Mean as an Adjective? The Word That Survived by Hiding in the Calendar

Amanda's first reaction to the word of the week is "That's a bunch of shit." Her second is to bend it into a wind joke, and she gets that joke off three separate times before Episode 119 of Sorta Sophisticated is over. The word is august, and what does august mean as an adjective turns out to be a different question from what it means on a calendar. It means majestic, dignified, imposing enough that you go quiet in front of it. Pronounced aw-GUST, stress on the second syllable — same Latin root as the month, doing an entirely different job.

What Does August Mean as an Adjective, Exactly?

August is an adjective describing a person, place or thing that inspires reverence and admiration through its dignity or sheer grandeur — majestic, imposing, worthy of respect.

Pete gets it right on-mic and adds the useful part: "It's a word you use when something has, like, a weight or dignity behind it. You have to take it seriously." That's the test. Not impressive, which you can say about a parking job. August is for the thing that outranks you.

The Stress Moves and the Word Changes Jobs

"You have to put the emphasis on the second syllable," Pete says. "August."

He's flagging a heteronym — same spelling, different pronunciation, different meaning. English is full of them and they mostly turn on stress: you record a record, you're content with the content, a rebel will rebel.

AW-gust is the month. Aw-GUST is the adjective. Move the stress one syllable to the right and you go from a proper noun on a wall calendar to something you'd say about a cathedral. Amanda, sensing an opening immediately, tries "the August of wind" and never really lets go of it. Two minutes later she calls the 9/11 recap "very somber — not a gust," and Pete surrenders: "you are on a roll with that shit." She lands it one last time twenty-five minutes on, and gets away with it every time.

The Month Got Here First, by About Six Hundred Years

Both words come down from the same Latin adjective, augustus, meaning venerable, majestic, noble. Pete has the connection right: the month is named for the emperor.

The order it happened in is the fun part.

The Roman Senate handed Octavian the honorific Augustus in 27 BC — not a name he was born with, a title voted to him, meaning roughly "the venerable one." Nineteen years later, in 8 BC, the month Sextilis was renamed Augustus in his honor, next door to the Julius that had already been renamed for his adoptive father. (The Romans tried the same trick on September and October, offering them to Germanicus and Domitian. Neither one stuck.)

English took the month early — it shows up by the late 11th century. It took the adjective late. The word august meaning "solemnly grand" doesn't turn up in English until the 1660s.

So for roughly six hundred years, English speakers wrote the word "August" constantly, on every letter and every ledger, without having any idea it also meant something. Amanda's instinct that "I didn't even know it was a word" is the normal state of affairs. The word had been hiding in plain sight since the Norman Conquest.

An Inauguration Is Literally a Bird Ceremony

Where augustus itself comes from is contested, and both candidates are good.

One line runs it back to augur — the Roman priest whose job was reading the flight of birds for signs of divine approval. On that reading, augustus originally meant something like "consecrated by the augurs," blessed by favorable omens. The other line runs it to augere, "to increase," which also gave us augment, auction (a price that increases) and author (from auctor, one who causes something to grow).

The augur branch pays off in a word nobody thinks twice about. Inaugurate comes from Latin inaugurare: to install someone in office after taking the omens and finding them favorable. Every inauguration on earth is, etymologically, a man watching birds and deciding it's fine.

That's the family august married into. It isn't just "impressive." It carries a residue of divine sign-off — the sense that whatever you're looking at was approved by something above your pay grade.

Amanda Says Nobody Will Ever Use It. Then the Episode Uses It.

"I feel like this is one of those words where it's gonna be hard," she says. "We're not gonna use it."

She has a point about the register. August is formal and a little old-fashioned; it lives in obituaries, ceremonies and the stock phrase legislators use on each other — this august body — which is about as often sarcastic as it is sincere, depending on who's at the microphone.

But the episode hands over the perfect occasion about four minutes earlier, and neither host notices. Amanda is describing the 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, the two square voids where the towers stood.

"You see just the expansive negative space," she says. "There's not a lot of words for it. You just, like — you experience it and you just want to stand there and take it in."

That's the word. Not sad, not impressive. August is precisely the thing you feel when you go silent in front of something and can't explain why standing there matters. If you ever need to use it, that's the occasion, and it comes up more often than Amanda thinks.

Some Words Survive by Being Attached to Something

Episode 119 is otherwise about how events fade — how a lived morning turns into a paragraph, and then into a date. Words go the same way. Most of them just quietly stop getting said.

August is a survivor, and it survived on a technicality. The adjective is rare and formal enough that you can go a whole year without hearing it said out loud. But it happens to share a spelling with a month that every human being on the planet has to write down twelve times a year, which keeps it in front of us whether we know what it means or not.

An emperor's press release from 27 BC is still printing itself on your phone's lock screen every summer, and the adjective rides along in the back seat for free.

Episode 119 of Sorta Sophisticated, "You Had To Be There: Why 9/11 Just Turned Into History (25 Years Later)," is Pete's attempt to pin down the exact moment an event stops being something people remember and becomes something people study. Also in there: the six-night gathering of more than 30 photojournalists who shot September 11, running right now, and Pete's argument that the conspiracy theories always get louder as the eyewitnesses thin out — with sixty years of JFK polling to back him up.

Hear the full episode here 👇 You Had To Be There: Why 9/11 Just Turned Into History (25 Years Later) (Episode 119)