Word.ws English Dictionary

aureole

/ˈɔː.ɹiː.əʊl/US/ˈɔɹ.i.oʊl/

aureole noun: a circle of light or halo around the head of a deity or a saint. Also the alternative form of aureola.

Noun

aureole (plural aureoles)

  1. A circle of light or halo around the head of a deity or a saint.
    • The lady's hair no woman could possess without feeling it her pride. It was the daily theme of her lady's-maid,—a natural aureole to her head.1859, George Meredith, chapter 16, in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. A History of Father and Son. […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Chapman and Hall, →OCLC
    • They sat quietly, side by side, without speaking. Philip enjoyed having her near him. He was warmed by her radiant health. A glow of life seemed like an aureole to shine about her.1915, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, “chapter 122”, in Of Human Bondage, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, →OCLC
  2. (broadly) Any luminous or colored ring that encircles something.
    • It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard […]1949, George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part One, Chapter 1
    • The dust of the road and his long, wiry hair made aureoles of red about him in the westering light […]1972, Ursula K. Le Guin, chapter 6, in The Farthest Shore, Atheneum Books
  3. A corona.
  4. A ring around an igneous intrusion.
    • Cleavage and folds are imprinted are overprinted by the contact metamorphic aureole, indicating that they belong to a pre-intrustive episode of rock deformation and accompanying regional deformation.1990, Roger Mason, Petrology of the Metamorphic Rocks, Chapter 3: "Metamorphism associated with igneous intrusions"

Verb

aureole (third-person singular simple present aureoles, present participle aureoling, simple past and past participle aureoled)

  1. (transitive) To surround with, or as if with, a halo.

Also used as

aureole is also the alternative form of aureola.

Forms of aureole

Noun
pluralaureoles
Verb
third-person singular presentaureoles
present participleaureoling
past participleaureoled
pastaureoled

Origin of aureole

From Middle English aureole, from Old French aureole, from Medieval Latin aureola (corona) (“golden (crown)”). Doublet of oriole.

Words formed from aureole

Phrases with aureole

Questions about aureole

What does aureole mean?
Aureole means a circle of light or halo around the head of a deity or a saint.
What part of speech is aureole?
Aureole can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce aureole?
Aureole is pronounced /ˈɔː.ɹiː.əʊl/ (UK).
What is the plural of aureole?
The plural of aureole is aureoles.

Words near aureole in the dictionary

  1. aureofungin
  2. aureofuscin
  3. aureola
  4. aureolae
  5. aureolas
  6. aureole
  7. aureole hat
  8. aureole hats
  9. aureoled
  10. aureoles
  11. aureolic

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: aureole (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-aureole.wav.

Cite this entry: “aureole.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/aureole. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.