wicked

In Old English, 'wicca' was a wizard, a man who worked in the arts of divination, spell-casting, and consultation with spirits. The word was specific and practical: it named a professional, the male counterpart to 'wicce' (witch). By the time Middle English scribes were writing, 'wicced' had appeared as an adjective, probably derived from the same root through a lost verb meaning to bewitch or practice sorcery. The earliest written record dates to around 1225, in the Ancrene Riwle, a guide for female recluses in England.

The path from sorcerer to morally evil was not a leap but a slide. In a Christian culture, anyone who communed with spirits was by definition acting against God's order. Chaucer used 'wikked' freely in the 1380s, applying it to the Devil, to false women, to greedy merchants: anyone whose character bent away from righteousness. The sorcerer had become a template for wrongness itself.

By the 17th century, 'wicked' had shed most of its supernatural weight and was working as a general term for moral depravity. Shakespeare deployed it across the full moral spectrum, from murderous intent to petty dishonesty. The King James Bible of 1611 used it hundreds of times, cementing it as the standard English word for moral evil. What had once named a professional now named a quality.

The word staged a curious reversal in 20th-century American slang. By the 1920s in jazz circles, 'wicked' began to mean impressively good: a wicked trumpet solo was one that hit with the force of something almost supernatural. New England dialect had been doing this for decades before jazz standardized it. By 2003, when Stephen Schwartz named his Broadway musical after it, the word carried both senses simultaneously.