conjure
/ˈkʌndʒə
/- Nowadays you might expect to hear of ‘animal spirits’ in shamanic ritual, conjuring the spirit of the bear.
- As Osa dancers perform a stick dance meant to conjure up the spirits of their ancestors, organizers say the festive season is not a denouncement of Western Christian values.
- Using 200-year-old legislation, he was convicted of pretending to conjure up spirits.
- Each face is conjured from eloquent pencil lines and blurs of paint against a virginal white swath of satin, hung vertically like an iconic banner.
- Although I broke the law, a mountain was conjured up from a molehill.
- And is Canada at risk of not getting any of the great new products being conjured up in the US labs?
Synonyms
- This is just a figment of the imagination of weak minds that conjure up images to provide solace when they cannot handle reality, she continued.
- When his mind chose to conjure up images, it presented every possible situation he could ever hate.
- Now mention a trip to Cyprus to a young footballer and immediately certain images are conjured in their minds.
Synonyms
- The very word conjures a mental menagerie of grotesque caricatures.
- Most would agree that in the English-speaking world, this word conjures disgust and contempt.
- Instead, the words conjure up unpleasant memories of mom's experimental eggplant lasagna and certain rubber-like meat substitutes.
- By the ministry of a faithful eunuch she transmitted to him a ring, the pledge of her affection, and earnestly conjured him to claim her as a lawful spouse to whom he had been secretly betrothed.
- She is conjured into being by Myrtle herself, by sympathetic magic, but once in the dramatic arena cannot be easily controlled or quelled; her spirit magic wreaks havoc.
- The audience gets a first-person view of a victim in the throes of death, with a full-screen view of her fading face as she conjures the victim to ‘stay with me.’
Phrases
a name to conjure with
Origin
Middle English (also in the sense 'oblige by oath'): from Old French conjurer 'to plot or exorcise', from Latin conjurare 'band together by an oath, conspire' (in medieval Latin 'invoke'), from con- 'together' + jurare 'swear'.
The earliest meanings of conjure were ‘to call on in the name of some divine or supernatural being’ and ‘to appeal solemnly to, entreat’—the -jure bit of the word is from Latin jurare ‘to swear’, which gave us words such as jury. A more familiar early meaning was ‘to call on a supernatural being to appear by means of a magic ritual’, from which the sense ‘to make something appear as if by magic’ developed. A name to conjure with comes from the idea of someone summoning the spirit of an influential or powerful person by saying their name out loud.