Witch

Witch (pronounced wich)

(1) A person, historically either male or female but now especially a woman, who professes or is supposed to practice magic or sorcery; a sorceress (especially popular in mythology and fiction but also associated with certain societies and historical periods and still current in parts of some countries).

(2) In the new age movement, a practitioner of a nature-based religion founded on ancient beliefs, which honors both a male and female divine principle and includes the practice of magic, especially associated with healing.

(3) An informal and derogatory term for an ugly, mean or wicked old woman; a hag.

(4) A fascinating or enchanting woman (usually in the sense of bewitching).

(5) A person who uses a divining rod; dowser (archaic).

(6) In the sense of witch-hunt, an intensive effort to discover and expose disloyalty, subversion, dishonesty, or the like, usually based on slight, doubtful, or irrelevant evidence.

(7) A flatfish, Pleuronectes (or Glyptocephalus) cynoglossus, of North Atlantic coastal waters, having a narrow greyish-brown body marked with tiny black spots.  The family group is Pleuronectidae (plaice, flounders etc)

(8) In geometry, a certain curve of the third order, also known as versiera.

(9) In entomology, the Indomalayan butterfly Araotes lapithis, of the Lycaenidae family.

Pre 900: From the Middle English wicche from the Old English wicce (sorceress, witch (female)) which were the feminine forms and existed in conjunction with wicca (witch, sorcerer, warlock, wizard), the masculine deverbative from wiccian (to practice sorcery) from the Proto-Germanic wikkōną.  Related were the West Frisian wikje, wikke (to foretell, warn), the Low German wicken (to soothsay) and the Dutch wikken, wichelen (to dowse, divine).  Root was the primitive Indo-European wik-néh, derivation of weyk- (to consecrate; separate); akin to the Latin victima (sacrificial victim), the Swedish vicka (to move to and fro), the Lithuanian viẽkas (life-force) and the Sanskrit विनक्ति (vinákti) (to set apart, separate out).  Witch, witcher & witchery are nouns; witching is a verb & adjective and witchy is an adjective, the noun plural is witches.

An obviously guilty witch before the court, lithograph of a witch trial in Salem, Massachusetts, circa 1692.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) does note the generally accepted etymology is not without phonetic or semantic difficulties and suggests some connection with the Old English wigle (divination) and wig & wih (idol), the nouns representing a Proto-Germanic wikkjaz (necromancer) (one who wakes the dead) from the primitive Indo-European weg-yo from weg (to be strong, be lively).  That wicce once had a more specific sense than the later general one of "female magician, sorceress" is suggested by the presence of other words in Old English describing more specific kinds of magical craft.  In the Laws of Ælfred (circa 890), witchcraft was specifically singled out as a woman's craft, the practitioners of which were not welcome to live among the Western Saxons.

In 2015, Nylon ran the story Lindsay Lohan had taken up witchcraft and wanted to be consecrated by a coven as a white witch.  Nylon did caution the source of the story was the National Enquirer, referred to as "a normally reliable source" only ever ironically. 

The glossary of the Laws of Ælfred translates Latin necromantia (demonum invocatio) as galdre or wiccecræft and in the Anglo-Saxon poem Men's Crafts, wiccræft appears to mean "skill with horses" so the OED is right to note the contested history.  By the early 1600s, the feminine form was so dominant that the forms men-witches or he-witches began to be used.  Warlock was never a universally accepted masculine form of witch despite the notion in modern popular culture and it’s from wicca that English ultimately gained both wizard and wicked.  Even in the sixteenth century, the implications were blurred, Reginald Scot in his The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) asserting it was synonymous in the English tongue to say either “she is a witch” or “she is a wise woman”.  In the popular imagination there's still a widespread perception witches were burned at the stake and while that was the case in many places (along with many other methods of dispatch), in the English-speaking world, because witchcraft was a felony in both England and the American colonies, witches were hanged and not burned.  Witches’ bodies were burned in Scotland, though they were strangled to death first.  The confusion may have arisen because there were cases of witches being burned at the stake but that was because they'd been convicted also of heresy.

Crooked Hillary Clinton has never denied practicing witchcraft (digitally altered image).

The extended sense of "young woman or girl of bewitching aspect or manners" is first recorded 1740.  It’s said to be an echo of the biblical (Exodus 22:18) rendering of mekhashshepheh, the feminine form of the word, meaning "enchantress" and (Deuteronomy 18:10-12) the masculine form (enchanter).  However, scripture is open to interpretation and the helpful translation in the King James Version: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" has been used by some contemporary ordinary Akan Christians in Ghana to justify praying for the death and destruction of witches and wizards.  Witch doctor is from 1718; applied to African magicians from 1836 and soon became interchangeable with “medicine man”.