warlock
Pluralwarlocks
- 1A person who practices magic or sorcery, often dark magic; traditionally a man and the male counterpart of a witch, but in modern fantasy a magic user of any gender.
Nobody guessed the quiet librarian was a warlock until she lit every candle in the hall with a flick of her wrist.
Half the warlocks on the council were women, and the eldest of them had served for three hundred years.
Similarwizard, sorcerer, mage, magician
Note
Fantasy writing makes the warlock a kind of being, not a kind of man. In Cassandra Clare and Robin Wasserman's Pale Kings and Princes (2015), a warlock on the Academy faculty is a woman with blue skin, one Downworlder among others. In Lawrence Watt-Evans's The Spell of the Black Dagger, the craft has its own name, warlockry. "She was a warlock" needs no feminine form, though outside fantasy the word still usually refers to a man.
Use it in a sentence
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Origin
Old English wǣrloga meant "traitor, deceiver," literally "truce-breaker," and it came from Proto-West Germanic *wārulogō ("liar"). It became Middle English warloghe, also spelled warlowe or warloȝe. The Old English word joined wǣr ("covenant, truce, promise"), from Proto-Indo-European *weh₁- ("true"), which also gave Latin vērus, with loga ("liar"), a relative of Old English lēogan and so of English lie. Old Saxon wārlogo ("liar, unfaithful one") is a cognate. Both the hard -ck ending and the meaning "male magic-user" began in Scottish and Northern English, based on the belief that such men were allied with the Devil and so had broken their baptismal vows. Some have suggested Old Norse varðlokkur ("incantations") as the source, but this is considered implausible, partly because the forms without -k are recorded earlier.