ensorcerize

present singular third person ensorcerizes · participle present ensorcerizing · participle past ensorcerized · past ensorcerized · alternative ensorcerise

1. transitiveTo control, transform, or otherwise affect through sorcery.

   Traitors found excuse for their treason in the assertion that they had been deluded by false predictions, or ensorcerised by magic;

   1852, Julia Pardoe, chapter 2, in The Life of Marie de Medicis, volume 1, page 138

   3 more examples

   Soclarus then refers to the fact that even friends, relations, and fathers, sometimes unintentionally bewitch their children, and goes on to speak of those who even fascinate and ensorcerise themselves by their own gaze.

   1877, William Wetmore Story, “The Evil Eye”, in Castle St. Angelo and The Evil Eye, page 161

   […] he was a masculine Circe, surrounded by and gloating over the souls of luckless librarians whom he had turned into books, and only waiting the appropriate moment to ensorcerize Eugene and Steven themselves, after the same fashion!

   1919, Mary Stanbery Watts, chapter 4, in From Father to Son, page 176

   […] between the light of the candle in the silver candlestick, which she had put down upon the little table at the bed’s head, and the light of the green lamp upon the chest of drawers, they stood looking at each other, like two ensorcerized automatons under the power of an invisible magician.

   1929, John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent, volume 2, page 691

2. figurativelyTo hold someone's attention or interest as if through sorcery.

   And I remembered it often, later, waking up in that cabin to windows steamed blue and the sun gone around the island; remembered putting down those queer, stark sentences half blind on yellow paper; remembered walking ensorcerized, tethered, down the gray cobble beach like an aisle.

   1989, Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, page 77

   1 more example

   We experience something of a very old magic: the same delight that comes to us when we read in a fairy tale of a witch who is beheaded without suffering harm, or when we have a dream of walking through a solid wall or a closed door, or when we watch that hackneyed but never-failing trick of movie-makers: the reversal of the film so that a character who has been seen (for instance) to leap from a cliff, is then seen to leap―impossibly and intoxicatingly―back up again. We are caught up in fantasy and ensorcerized.

   1947, Alan Devoe, chapter 14, in Speaking of Animals, page 98