incantation

plural incantations · alternative encantation

1. The act or process of using formulas and/or usually rhyming words, sung or spoken, with occult ceremonies, for the purpose of raising spirits, producing enchantment, or creating other magical results.

   new years eve we dropped mushrooms / and danced around the house / making music with everything that we found / incantation replaced resolution

   2008, “Red Letter Year”, in Red Letter Year, performed by Ani Difranco

   Synonyms: bewitchment, galdr, bewitching, bewitchment, spellcasting, enchanting, enchantment, fascination

2. A formula of words used as above.

   My ancient Incantations are too weake, / And hell too ſtrong for me to buckle with:

   1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Sixt”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act V, scene iii], page 115, column 2

   5 more examples

   We did not know what scrambled eggs were, and we fancied that it must be some Red Indian or Sandwich Islands sort of dish that required dances and incantations for its proper cooking.

   1889, Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat […]

   Then he produced a string of beads, and after placing it over the scratchings he had made on the soil, jerked out some strange incantation in a voice that thickened and quivered with terror.

   1912, Elliott O'Donnell, Werwolves

   It is nothing new, these vital lies men tell themselves, muttering and mumbling them like charms and incantations against the powers of Night. The voodoos and medicine men and the devil-devil doctors were the fathers of metaphysics.

   1913 August, Jack London, John Barleycorn, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC

   Yarrow is one of the aboriginal English plants, and from time immemorial it has been used in incantations and by witches. Country folk still regard it as one of our most valuable herbs, especially for rheumatism.

   1922, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, The Old English Herbals, Longmans, Green and Co.

   The witch, repository of hieratic lore and folk legends and occult arcana, became the distributor of philtres and unguents, electuaries and pastilles, herbs and charms and incantations - directed toward sexual pleasures and amatory satisfactions.

   1961, Harry E. Wedeck, Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs, New York: The Citadel Press, page 223

   Synonyms: enchantment, hex, spell, cantrip, chantment, charm, conjuration, craft

3. slangcomputingAny esoteric command or procedure.

   The appropriate incantation of route is shown below; the gw keyword tells it that the next argument denotes a gateway.

   1998, John Purcell, Robert Kiesling, Linux: The Complete Reference: Book 1, page 412

   2 more examples

   There's more than one command incantation to create an AVI. It's all a question of experimenting with the different audio and video codecs.

   2005, Kyle Rankin, Linux Multimedia Hacks: Tips & Tools for Taming Images, Audio, and Video

   Servers move from being special snowflakes to being disposable numbers on a list that can be created and destroyed without requiring someone to remember the specific incantation to make it work.

   2017, James Pogran, Learning PowerShell DSC, page 11