warlock

I think Cordelia Chase once shorthanded warlocks as “whatever the boy of witch is,” and that’s basically how we use the term today, should we have reason to. That strikes me as weird because witch has a certain usage regardless of gender — “all of them witches,” for example, from Rosemary’s Baby, even if the coven has a lot of male members — and meanwhile warlock cannot transcend gender in that way. Unlike with witch, a warlock specifically a male spellcaster. According to Etymonline, the word comes from the Old English wærloga, “traitor, liar, enemy, devil,” with wær meaning “faith, a compact, agreement, covenant,” and loga being related to the Old English verb leogan, “to lie.” It’s noted that the original sense might have been something like “oath breaker,” and I suppose that would make sense in that a man who practices sorcery would have violated some kind of Christian oath not to do that.

Witch, by the way, is the feminine form of a different word for a male spellcaster, it seems. It comes from the Old English wicce, “female magician, sorceress,” and the female form of wicca, “sorcerer, wizard, man who practices witchcraft or magic.” And both come from the verb wiccian, “to practice witchcraft,” but that’s as far back as anyone can take it with certainty. It’s of uncertain origin beyond this point.

I looked this up because on my podcast we just covered the episode of Bewitched that introduces Paul Lynde as Uncle Arthur, and the show specifies that he’s a warlock, not a witch. I wonder if it’s like widow and widower, where it’s one of the few words where the default form is female and the male form is the exception?