presto changeint.n.adj.adv.

1812 Lady's Monthly Museum Sept. 154 Whiff! take up another paper, presto, change, move, and be gone!

1852 N.-Y. Daily Times 5 Oct. 8/4 His finger touched a secret spring, and, ‘presto change’, open flew a little secret door.

1862 in Civil War Hist. 48 (2002) 249 [In Delaware one is acceptable, but if one lives] a few yards further north, presto, change, he is an alien enemy.

1896 Poetical Rev. 14 While presto change! and lo his magic spell Transforms each heart into a ‘tolling bell’.

1916 Proc. Mod. Lang. Assoc. 31 456 Take them out into the streets or cemeteries and presto, change; they become miracle plays again!

1958 C. G. Bowers My Mission to Spain i. ii. 27 Presto, change! Now the children are dancing, the Plaza swirling with the steps of the ‘Navarre’—and now they are singing, and now the pursuit of the monsters begins again.

1997 New Straits Times (Malaysia) (Nexis) 18 July 10 He wants to say ‘presto—change’ and have all the troubles vanish, but life doesn't work that way.

1824 Pensacola Gaz. & W. Florida Advertiser 3 Apr. A tailor cannot drop his bodkin, a brick mason his trowel, or a grocer his cent per cent on coffee and candles; and become my Lord Coke or Hale by a ‘presto change’.

1852 R. C. Winthrop Addresses & Speeches 386 If by the utterance of some magic phrase, some ‘presto—change’, our railroads could be annihilated,..is there a man..who would take the responsibility of the act.

1868 Galaxy May 647/1 No mid-ocean conjuror's trick..ever divested her, by a ‘Presto! change!’ of her British nationality.

1893 Harper's Mag. Nov. 884/1 The transition was sudden and wonderful as the presto change! of the conjuror.

1904 Science Feb. 475/1 The author does not commit himself as to the exact point at which the ‘presto change’ occurred.

1999 Dallas (Texas) Morning News (Nexis) 29 Sept. 36 Between his presto changes, local magicians will be invited onstage.

1835 D. Crockett Life Martin Van Buren i. 51 He made one of his ‘presto, change’ kind of summersets,..and all-at-once he was missing from the federal, but instantly found..in the republican ranks.

1876 Appletons' Jrnl. 25 Mar. 398/3 They do not believe in the ‘presto-change’ movement. Conversion, they insist, must be gradual.

1877 J. B. Holder Hist. Amer. Fauna in J. Richardson et al. Museum Nat. Hist. III. p. xii/1 Ateles introduces his tail,..grasps the egg with the..tip, and, somewhat in the presto! change!! manner of Joe Grimaldi, passes the morsel..to his mouth.

1900 Anaconda (Montana) Standard 27 Dec. 9/2 Then there was some of that ‘presto change’ business and the two handkerchiefs came forth as at the beginning.

1950 Waukesha (Wisconsin) Daily Freeman 11 Mar. 4/5 It won't do to expect immediate presto-change miracles.

1995 Washingtonian (Nexis) Apr. She has seen ‘presto-change’ results for some kids on the drug. One day they spend two seconds scribbling a picture; the next they are coloring in the lines, shading the picture, staying with it for 15 minutes.

1996 Skiing Feb. 24 (headline) Presto change snowshoes... Powder Wings compactible snowshoes are...absurdly easy to assemble and disassemble.

1987 National Petroleum News (Nexis) May 16 This line of thinking also suggests that with production on the downside in the U.S., all we need do is open the spigot and this lost production just gushes forth presto-change.