wizard
/ˈwɪzəd
/- Many casters such as wizards, necromancers or enchanters were best paired with a cleric because after casting, a cleric could mend the internal wounds.
- There were four ranks a person could be - witch or wizard, mage, enchanter or enchantress, and sorcerer or sorceress.
Synonyms
- A Wall Street operator who was already in his fifties when he moved to London, Schechter is a prodigious talker, a showman and a financial wizard with a gift for innovation.
- They include hoteliers, brewery giants, food specialists, financial wizards, recycling experts and transport logicists.
- The centre-half forward, as much a wizard with an accordion as a caman, thundered the ball away from MacNiven and it sailed into the net.
Synonyms
- A software wizard takes users through the activation process.
- These capabilities should be easy to configure and manage through graphical user interfaces and wizards.
- If elected, I will appoint Buni as my Shadow Education Secretary, on the strength of this wizard idea of his in Peter's comments box.
- Bloomsbury shares would be a wizard idea for a present.
- A wizard idea that Steven's ambitious deputy may find hard.
Derivatives
wizardly
- President Johnson promised a War on Poverty, driven by a wizardly new Keynesian confidence that an economy of unprecedented abundance could deliver more groceries to everyone.
- Call yourself a graphic designer and you're identified as an artsy computer geek being hired to spice up a document with your wizardly technical skill.
- Who can begrudge the rewards for three epic movies that were seven years in the making, and combined Tolkien's wizardly storytelling with the cutting edge of new technology?
Origin
Late Middle English (in the sense 'philosopher, sage'): from wise1 + -ard.
witch from Old English:
In Anglo-Saxon times witches were of both sexes. The masculine form was wicca, which is the source of wicked, and has also been revived in recent times by modern pagans as the name of their religion, Wicca. A female witch was a wicce. A male witch would now be called a wizard (Late Middle English), a word that comes from wise—in the Middle Ages wizards were wise men or sages, only becoming magicians in the mid 16th century. See also warlock. The witching hour is midnight, the time when witches are active. The phrase is from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Hamlet himself declares: Tis now the very witching time of night, / When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out / Contagion to this world.’ George Orwell was the first to use witch-hunt to mean ‘a campaign directed at people holding views considered unorthodox or a threat to society’, in reference to Communists being persecuted in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Before that a witch-hunt was a real hunt for witches, though the term is recorded first in novels from the 19th century, long after witches had stopped being burned at the stake.