This is a wizard (‘magus’ is Latin for wizard) who can transform him or herself into an animal. Minerva McGonagall turns herself into a cat at the beginning of the first book. Sirius Black becomes a dog—Harry mistakes him for a Grim—in The Prisoner of Azkaban, Peter Pettigrew transforms himself into a rat (with one of his toes missing because he himself is missing a finger), and even Harry’s father, James Potter, became a stag at one point of his life, which led to his nickname of ‘Prongs’.
Animagi reflect one’s personality. Witness Rita Skeeter becoming a beetle. (Journalists are sometimes called deathwatch beetles because of their voyeuristic nature.) If Rowling could turn herself into an animal, she says she’d become an otter. (One might have expected her to say a rabbit, her favourite pet.) Hermione becomes one, reflecting this wish—Hermione being Rowling’s alter ego in many ways.
Aparecium
This substance performs the unique feat of making invisible writing readable. Hermione used it to try to read Tom Riddle’s diary in Chamber of Secrets but it didn’t work for her.
Apparate
Basically this means to appear. Its opposite, hardly surprisingly is ‘disapparate’.
Arachnophobia
A condition that Rowling—like Ron—suffers from. It means a fear of spiders.
Aragog
Giant spider-like creature with the gift of speech. It dies in The Half-Blood Prince.
Arantes, Jorge
Portuguese television journalist who married Rowling in 1992 when she’d gone to that country to teach. The marriage, however, lasted only little more than a year. In a violent outburst one night, he threw her out of their home after she told him she didn’t love him any more. She stood on the street lost and forlorn, her whole world having crumbled…and her daughter Jessica unreachable inside with her fiery spouse. The police were called, a row ensued and Arantes finally parted from the little girl.
Rowling took Jessica back to Edinburgh, but Arantes followed her there. A period of intense friction followed. She finally obtained a restraining order against him and they formally divorced soon afterwards. He later wrote a kiss-and-tell article about her. Or perhaps that should be a write-and-tell one, because in it he claimed he had played a significant part in ‘midwifing’ Harry Potter. Rowling discounts this claim as arrant nonsense.
In one of the Potter books Rowling makes a wry reference to her wedding date, 16 October, by also making this the date Professor Sibyll Trelawney tells Lavender Brown a dreadful event will befall her. Hell hath no fury. It’s also significant that Rowling wore black on her wedding day. Had she a Potter-like premonition that things would go wrong?
Arithmancy
Hermione’s favourite subject, this is the process of predicting the future through numbers. It’s also called numerology. It comes from two Greek words: ‘arithmo’ meaning number and ‘mancy’ meaning prophecy.
Arresto Momentum
This is the spell Dumbledore used to prevent Harry from falling to his death on the Quidditch pitch in The Prisoner of Azkaban.
Ascendio
Harry used this spell to rise up over the lake water in Goblet of Fire.
Aubrey, Bertram
A Hogwarts student from the 1970s. Harry’s father once received detention for causing his head to double in size.
Auction
The first time Rowling heard her agent Christopher Little speaking to her about an auction she thought—furniture. Only later did it dawn on her that he was referring to a megabucks bidding war for her book. The rollercoaster ride had begun…
Austen, Jane
Rowling surprisingly lists this author as one of her main inspirations. She liked Pride and Prejudice as a teenager but her favourite Austen novel is Emma, which she claims to have read a whopping 20 times. From Austen’s Mansfield Park she got the name of Argus Filch’s cat, Mrs Norris.
Autobiography
Rowling hasn’t written this yet, but has spoken often about her life. The character who most resembles her in her books, she says, is Hermione. She admits she seemed to be something of a swot at school. (She read Vanity Fair at the tender age of 14!) Like Hermione, Rowling says she was insecure behind the perceived swot image. (However, she hasn’t been known to cast spells with the same success as Ms Granger).
‘I was neither as bright nor as annoying as Hermione,’ she said in an interview once, adding that if she was she would have deserved ‘drowning at birth’. She was, of course, only joking here. As the series goes on, Hermione becomes much less irksome when she realises there are more important things in life than reading and being first at exams—like friendship, for instance. (Rowling says she doesn’t believe in magic either, except for the magic of love.)
Avada Kedavra
This is the curse that Voldemort used to kill Harry’s parents (and almost Harry). It’s Aramaic for ‘abracadabra’, which literally means ‘Let the thing be destroyed’. (In its original usage it was a plea for a cure rather than a curse, the ‘thing’ being an illness.) Harry is the only person ever to have survived it, both at his birth and during a duelling bout with Voldemort wherein they both have similar wands, which detracts from their potential.
Azkaban
The prison from which Sirius Black escapes after turning himself into a dog. It sounds somewhat similar to Alcatraz, which was also high security and located on an island.
Babbling Beverage
Potion that causes the victim to talk nonsense. Snape threatens Harry with it in The Order of the Phoenix.
Bagshot, Bathilda
Author of A History of Magic, she was a family friend of