Where the word 'auction' comes from, and other odd origins

The word is older than the auction house, older than the gavel and older than English. It comes from a Latin noun about growth, which is a fair description of what happens when two people want the same thing at the same time.

What follows is what can actually be established, with the doubtful parts marked as doubtful.

Auction means an increasing

The English word comes from Latin auctio, an increase or a growth, formed from the verb augere, to increase. The same root sits underneath augment and auxiliary. A Roman auctio was, quite literally, a sale by increasing bids.

It entered English in the 1590s. Auctioneer is much later, first recorded in 1708, which means that for more than a century English had auctions but no word for the person running one.

The spear in the ground

Romans held auctions constantly: estates, debts, confiscated property and the plunder of a campaign. A public sale was announced by planting a spear, the hasta, in the ground at the place of sale. Goods sold this way were sold sub hasta, under the spear. Our phrase under the hammer has the same shape, although the gavel arrived far later and the two are not directly connected.

The man calling the sale was the praeco, a crier, who also advertised it beforehand. Sales were held in an atrium auctionarium, a room where goods could be inspected before the bidding started. That is a viewing day under a different name. Almost every part of the modern arrangement is visible in the Roman one.

Two famous sales, one of them probably invented

The most notorious auction in history took place in Rome in the year 193. The Praetorian Guard had killed the emperor Pertinax. Rather than choose a successor, they offered the throne to whoever would pay the most for it.

Two men bid. Sulpicianus, the dead emperor's father-in-law, was already inside the camp. Didius Julianus, a wealthy senator, bid from outside the walls and won by promising each soldier a larger sum. He was declared emperor on 28 March 193. He was killed on 1 June the same year, having reigned about sixty-six days, because the armies in the provinces refused to accept a throne that had been bought. The episode opened what historians now call the Year of the Five Emperors.

It is the earliest well-documented case of the thing every auctioneer depends on: a bidder raising his own number, not because the object improved, but because somebody else wanted it.

Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, described an annual auction in Babylonian villages at which young women were married off to the highest bidder, the sums raised on the most sought-after being used as dowries for the rest. It gets quoted constantly as the first auction on record.

It is also, most likely, not history. Scholars have pointed out that nothing in the surviving Babylonian material supports it and that the account reads like a Greek writer reworking customs he only half understood. Worth knowing, mainly so that you do not repeat it as a fact from the microphone.

Lot has nothing to do with auctions

A lot was originally an object used to settle somebody's share: a chip of wood, a straw, a piece of bone with a mark on it. Old English hlot. You put them in a helmet, shook it, and whichever fell out first decided the matter. That is what casting lots and drawing lots mean, and it is where lottery comes from as well.

From the thing that decides your share it slid to the share itself, then to a parcel of land, then to a batch of goods sold together at a sale. The sense of a great many, as in a lot of people, is later still and comes from the auction meaning rather than the other way round.

So when you number your lots on a Friday evening, you are using a word for a piece of wood in a hat.

From candles to catalogues

Long before the gavel, English sales were closed by fire. In a candle auction an inch of candle was lit at the start and bidding continued while it burned. Whoever had made the last bid when the flame died took the goods.

The practice appears in the records of the House of Lords in 1641. Samuel Pepys recorded attending one on 6 November 1660, for the sale of two ships, and noted that it was the first of the kind he had ever seen.

One variant pushed a pin into the wax an inch down; when the wax melted the pin dropped, and the last bid before the drop won. Either way the design problem is the one every organiser still has today. An ending nobody can predict stops people from waiting. That is exactly why a modern lot extends when somebody bids in the final seconds instead of simply stopping, and the countdown and the extension are described on the how it works page. Same idea, without the wax.

The Dutch ran it backwards

An auction does not have to go up. In the Netherlands, produce has been sold for well over a century on a descending clock. The price starts high and falls, and the first buyer to press the button takes the goods at whatever number the clock had reached. Hesitate and you pay less. Hesitate slightly too long and you get nothing at all.

The first vegetable auction of this kind is generally placed at Broek op Langedijk in 1887, where growers brought their produce to the sale by boat. The flower auction at Aalsmeer, founded in 1911, made the format famous and still moves enormous volumes on the same principle. It is the mirror image of the Roman sale: instead of the price growing until one bidder is left, it falls until the first bidder moves.

Sotheby's dates itself to 11 March 1744, when the bookseller Samuel Baker sold several hundred volumes from a private library in London and took £826 for them. Christie's held its first sale on 5 December 1766. Both began with books rather than paintings, and the art business came afterwards.

Which means that the whole tradition of the salesroom as most people picture it, with a catalogue, a viewing, an estimate and a gavel, is somewhere under three hundred years old. The behaviour it manages is roughly ten times older than that.

What all of this says about Friday night

Strip away the spear, the candle and the clock and the same thing keeps happening. A person decides what something is worth to them. Then they discover that somebody else wants it, and the number changes.

None of that requires a professional. It requires visible competition, an ending people believe in, and a moment when the room can see what is going on. That is why the current lot, the highest bid, the countdown and the running total belong on a screen everybody can see, and why the last minute of a lot matters more than anything else in the evening. The practical side of building that is set out in the guide, and the people who run sales for a living work from exactly the same three ingredients; there is a version for them on the page for auction professionals.

Two thousand years of evidence point the same way. People bid faster and higher when there is somebody standing near them who wants precisely what they want. Your job on the night is to make sure they can tell. You can build and rehearse a full evening before committing to anything, and the getting started walk-through takes it in order.