witchery

English

Etymology

witch +‎ -ery

Noun

witchery (countable and uncountable, plural witcheries)

  1. (uncountable) Witchcraft.
    • 1924, George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan, Scene 6,
      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.
  2. (countable) An act of witchcraft.
    • 1820, Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, Chapter 36,
      “ […] It may be they know something of the witcheries of this woman.”
  3. (uncountable, figuratively) Allure, charm, magic.
    • 1819, William Wordsworth, Peter Bell, A Tale in Verse, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, Part I, p. 20,
      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,
      “ […] 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,
      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,
      […] 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.

Synonyms
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