I received a message in which the writer used the word Aryan in a way that puzzled me, because I had only thought of it in terms of the 4th. def. given by Atomica:
Ar·y·an (âr'ē-ən, ăr'-)
n.
1. Indo-Iranian. No longer in technical use.
2. A member of the people who spoke the parent language of the Indo-European languages. No longer in technical use.
3. A member of any people speaking an Indo-European language. No longer in technical use.
4. In Nazism and neo-Nazism, a non-Jewish Caucasian, especially one of Nordic type, supposed to be part of a master race.
[From Sanskrit ārya-, noble, Aryan.]

I may be the only one who was ignorant of what they had following the definitions, but I found it enlightening. Ar'y·an adj.
WORD HISTORY It is one of the ironies of history that Aryan, a word nowadays referring to the blond-haired, blue-eyed physical ideal of Nazi Germany, originally referred to a people who looked vastly different. Its history starts with the ancient Indo-Iranians, Indo-European peoples who inhabited parts of what are now Iran, Afghanistan, and India. Their tribal self-designation was a word reconstructed as *arya– or *ārya–. The first of these is the form found in Iranian, as ultimately in the name of Iran itself (from Middle Persian Ērān (šahr), “(Land) of the Iranians,” from the genitive plural of Ēr, “Iranian”). The variant *ārya– is found unchanged in Sanskrit, where it referred to the upper crust of ancient Indian society. These words became known to European scholars in the 18th century. The shifting of meaning that eventually led to the present-day sense started in the 1830s, when Friedrich Schlegel, a German scholar who was an important early Indo-Europeanist, came up with a theory that linked the Indo-Iranian words with the German word Ehre, “honor,” and older Germanic names containing the element ario–, such as the Swiss warrior Ariovistus who was written about by Julius Caesar. Schlegel theorized that far from being just a designation of the Indo-Iranians, the word *arya– had in fact been what the Indo-Europeans called themselves, meaning something like “the honorable people.” (This theory has since been called into question.) Thus “Aryan” came to be synonymous with “Indo-European,” and in this sense entered the general scholarly consciousness of the day. Not much later, it was proposed that the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans had been in northern Europe. From this theory, it was but a small leap to think of the Aryans as having had a northern European physiotype. While these theories were playing themselves out, certain anti-Semitic scholars in Germany took to viewing the Jews in Germany as the main non-Aryan people because of their Semitic roots; a distinction thus arose in their minds between Jews and the “true Aryan” Germans, a distinction that later furnished unfortunate fodder for the racial theories of the Nazis.


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The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.


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Aryan [Sanskrit,=noble], term formerly used to designate the Indo-European race or language family or its Indo-Iranian subgroup. Originally a group of nomadic tribes, the Aryans were part of a great migratory movement that spread in successive waves from S Russia and Turkistan during the 2d millennium B.C. Throughout Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, literate urban centers fell to their warrior bands. Archaeological evidence corroborates the text of the Veda by placing the invasion of India by the Aryans at c. 1500 B.C. They colonized the Punjab region of NW India and absorbed much of the indigenous culture. The resulting Indo-Aryan period saw the flourishing of a pastoral-agricultural economy that utilized bronze objects and horse-drawn chariots. Before the discovery of the Indus valley sites in the 1920s, Hindu culture had been attributed solely to the Aryan invaders. The idealization of conquest pictured in the Vedic hymns was incorporated into Nazi racist literature, in which German descent was supposedly traced back to Aryan forebears.


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The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia Copyright © 1999, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/