'Noble or Pious.' Was also used as another name for ancient vedic bharatas tribe, whose main rival tribe were the Dasas. "Aryan" is an English language loanword derived from the Sanskrit ārya ('noble'). The term ārya was used as an ethnic self-designation by the Indo-Iranian speaking tribes in the ancient times. It was believed in the 19th century that it was also a self-designation used by all Proto-Indo-Europeans, a theory that has now been abandoned.
In present-day academia, the term "Aryan" has been replaced in most cases by the terms "Indo-Iranian" and "Indo-European", and "Aryan" is now mostly limited to its appearance in the term of the "Indo-Aryan languages" in South Asia.