The Etymology of Attraction
Attraction is a quiet workhorse of Latinate English. The Latin verb trahere meant to draw or pull, and prefixing ad- (toward) gave attrahere — to pull toward — and the noun attractio for the action of doing so. English picked the word up around 1410 in scientific and medical contexts: alchemists wrote of the attractive power of certain stones, magnets and lodestones famously possessed it, and Newton later used it as the formal name for gravity in the Principia (1687). The emotional sense — one person being drawn toward another — only entered general use in the 17th century and became dominant in English Romantic writing of the 18th. The same Latin trahere has been astonishingly productive: tractor, abstract, contract, distract, extract, retract, subtract, traction, train, trail, trait, treat, and portrait all descend from it, ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European root *tragh- meaning to drag.