witchery
English
Etymology
Noun
witchery (countable and uncountable, plural witcheries)
- (uncountable) Witchcraft.
- 1924, George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan, Scene 6,[1]
- They are determined that I shall be burnt as a witch; and they sent their doctor to cure me; but he was forbidden to bleed me because the silly people believe that a witch’s witchery leaves her if she is bled; so he only called me filthy names.
- 1924, George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan, Scene 6,[1]
- (countable) An act of witchcraft.
- 1820, Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, Chapter 36,[2]
- “ […] It may be they know something of the witcheries of this woman.”
- 1820, Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, Chapter 36,[2]
- (uncountable, figuratively) Allure, charm, magic.
- 1819, William Wordsworth, Peter Bell, A Tale in Verse, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, Part I, p. 20,[3]
- At noon, when by the forest’s edge
- He lay beneath the branches high,
- The soft blue sky did never melt
- Into his heart,—he never felt
- The witchery of the soft blue sky!
- 1847, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Chapter 24,[4]
- “ […] I am influenced—conquered; and the influence is sweeter than I can express; and the conquest I undergo has a witchery beyond any triumph I can win. […] ”
- 1860, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, Volume I, Chapter 17,[5]
- He beheld the scene in his mind’s eye, through the witchery of many intervening years, and faintly illuminated it as if with starlight instead of this broad glow of moonshine.
- 1920, Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, Book I, Chapter 1,[6]
- […] already his imagination, leaping ahead of the engagement ring, the betrothal kiss and the march from Lohengrin, pictured her at his side in some scene of old European witchery.
- 1819, William Wordsworth, Peter Bell, A Tale in Verse, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, Part I, p. 20,[3]