entrancing

1. 1
   adjective

   So charming and delightful that it fills the observer with rapture or great delight.

   The garden was an entrancing blend of color and fragrance.

   Critics praised the film's entrancing visuals and haunting score.

   Similarenchanting, captivating, bewitching, beguiling, charming

   Oppositedull, boring

   Note

   Here the spell is delight rather than hypnosis: what is entrancing in this sense charms and enraptures. Henry Rider Haggard's She (1886–87) speaks of a woman's "entrancing loveliness," pairing it with beauty, its natural company. Beside the hypnotic meaning, the difference lies in the result: rapture here, a narrowed, trance-like attention there. Many uses, such as an entrancing melody, sit comfortably between the two.

2. 2
   adjective

   Producing a trance-like, hypnotic state in which awareness narrows and attention becomes fixed.

   The drummer kept up an entrancing beat that held the crowd in a near-hypnotic state.

   The slow, swinging motion of the pendulum had an entrancing effect on the patient.

   Similarhypnotic, mesmerizing, spellbinding

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of entrance.

   The hypnotist spent the evening entrancing volunteers from the crowd.

   The soft melody was entrancing everyone in the hall.

   Note

   Behind it stands a transitive verb, so it always takes an object: a melody is entrancing the audience. Two meanings travel with it, putting someone into a trance and filling them with delight, and these settle into the hypnotic adjective and the charming adjective. Keep it apart from the noun entrance, a doorway or the act of going in. That word shares the spelling but never takes -ing.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The process by which a person is brought into a trance-like or spellbound condition.

   Nothing in the first act prepares you for the slow entrancing of the crowd as the drums build.

   Critics debated whether the ritual's entrancing of participants was genuine or staged.

   Note

   A verbal noun that has become countable, so it takes a plural, entrancings. Hugh Smith Carpenter's Here and Beyond (1859) has adolescence coming "to romantic entrancings." There the plural marks separate episodes of being spellbound. Use the plural for such episodes. For the process itself, use the singular with of: the entrancing of an audience.

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