Witch

How to spell witch

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce witch

What does witch mean?

1. nounA woman believed to have magical powers, especially one who casts spells.

Witch in a sentence

• The children dressed as a witch and a vampire for Halloween.

• In the old fairy tale, a wicked witch cursed the sleeping princess.

Where does witch come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English wicce, the feminine term for a woman thought to practise magic or sorcery, alongside the masculine wicca, meaning a male magician. Both came from the verb wiccian, 'to work magic or cast spells', whose deeper roots are uncertain but may connect to ideas of bending, twisting, or waking the dead. In Middle English the spelling settled with the 'tch' cluster that we still keep, and the word gradually narrowed to its familiar sense of a woman with supernatural powers. The modern revived religion 'Wicca' borrows that very Old English masculine form directly. The spelling trap is simple but persistent: 'witch' sounds identical to 'which', so the silent 't' and the magical meaning are what set this word apart on the page.

How the word is built

• witch (a single root from Old English wicce, a female practitioner of magic; not built from a prefix or suffix)

Words that sound like witch

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• which: Used to ask about or specify one or more items from a known or limited set.