Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun An old mode of divination, consisting in suspending a sieve, or fixing it to the point of a pair of shears, then repeating a formula of words and the names of persons suspected of some crime or other act. If the sieve moved when a name was repeated, the person named was deemed guilty.
 
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun Divination by means of a suspended sieve.
 
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun   
Divination by the use of a suspendedsieve sometimes from tongs or shears. The movement of the sieve when a person's name or word is spoken is interpreted. 
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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By coscinomancy, most religiously observed of old amidst the ceremonies of the ancient Romans.
Five books of the lives, heroic deeds and sayings of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel 2002
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By coscinomancy, most religiously observed of old amidst the ceremonies of the ancient Romans.
Five books of the lives, heroic deeds and sayings of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel 2002
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As for magic, necromancy, pyromancy, geomancy, coscinomancy, and all the other mancies -- there was then a whole literature about them.
Historical Lectures and Essays Charles Kingsley 1847
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A mode of divination much in vogue in New England as in Old. Called also “sieve and shears” or “riddle and shears”: the learned name is coscinomancy.
"Letter of Thomas Brattle, F. R. S., 1692"; from Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648-1706 1692
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By coscinomancy, most religiously observed of old amidst the ceremonies of the ancient Romans.
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 3 Fran��ois Rabelais 1518
 
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