Fun fact: the word author didn’t always have a th. Until the seventeenth century, it had a t, reflecting its Latin origins, but someone somewhere along the line confused it with the word authentic, with evident results. In Middle English, there were a ton of different spellings floating around, including auctor, autor, auctour, and many more. Before that, the term was Old French, where similar variations existed. The relevant Latin word, auctor, meant more than “author”: it had a broader definition of “creator” or “originator”. In this case, it’s an originator of a story, but it could also mean “founder”, “father”, “performer”, and “builder” – all creators of their own types. Auctor is from the verb augere, “to increase”, which, through Proto-Italic, derives from the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction hewg, with the same meaning.
