STEVE CARUSO: Abracadabra is NOT Aramaic.
Technically he is correct, but I think it's a little more complicated. Steve acknowledges that the first part of the phrase, "Abra," could come from the Aramaic word "to create," although it is badly pronounced (but ancient Greek-speaking magicians were less than rigorous about such things) and that the middle part, "ca" could be a preposition meaning "as" or "like." The problem is the last part, "dabra" which looks like an Aramaic form (with the emphatic ending "-a") of the Hebrew (not Aramaic) word davar (דבר), "word" (not "I speak"). As far as I can tell, this Hebraism is not attested in Aramaic, but we should be cautious about this, since the Hebrew root was borrowed into Aramaic, as we see in the word dibbura (דיבורא), "speech, "utterance," etc., in Rabbinic Aramaic (Jastrow, 295; Sokoloff, Palestinian, 144; Sokoloff, Babylonian, 326). If we allow for the possible similar (and otherwise unattested) borrowing of davar, Abracadabra could be a badly pronounced rendition of "I create according to the word" or the like. It seems entirely plausible to me that an ancient Jewish or Greco-Egyptian magician could have come up with this sort of cool-sounding incantation.
More on Abracadabra here and here and links.
Cross-file under "Aramaic Watch."
