incantatory

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“
Through a kind of incantatory or sacrificial rite, they try to call up and reinstate the tropes, schemas or words which to them distinguish professorial language.

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Definitions (2)

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  1. Dealing by enchantment; practised in incantation; magical. Fortune-tellers, juglers, geomancers, and the like incantatory impostors. Sir T. Browne, Vulg. Err., i. 3. It is related that the necromancers of Thessaly added the blood of infants to that of black lambs in their incantatory rites, that the evoked spirits would render themselves objective from the exhalations of the blood. Gentleman's Mag., quoted in Pop. Sci. Mo., XXVI. 212.

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Examples (29)

  • Natty, currently the biggest British reggae star, tries a transported, incantatory mode, whispering, "don't believe what they say." —  The Independent - Frontpage RSS Feed
  • Unfortunately, the wild, soulful, incantatory singer for Kansas City's Mythical Beast is often surrounded by housecats on her group's debut LP, —  The Pitch | Complete Issue
  • Experimental but rigorous, an incantatory frenzy spirals around the freewheeling narrator.
  • This observation, as with all of the prize ones, had been recorded later and laid over the sound of the wind and the waves, to give the effect of incantatory nature poetry. —  New Statesman
  • His stories march forward at an incantatory, rhythmic pace, and are full of tongue-twisters, word play, and highly inventive vocabulary.
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This word has been looked up 36 times.

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Etymologies (1)

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. = Italian incantatorio, from Late Latin as if *incantatorius, from incantator, enchanter: see incantator.
 

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