wicce

Old English wicce (feminine) and wicca (masculine) are of uncertain deeper etymology. One theory connects them to a root meaning 'to bend' or 'to turn' — a witch bends the natural order. Another links them to wit and wisdom — a witch is someone with forbidden knowledge. The modern religion Wicca, founded by Gerald Gardner in the 1950s, borrowed the masculine Old English form for its name. The spelling and pronunciation have shifted: Old English wicca was pronounced /ˈwittʃɑ/, close to 'witcha.' Modern Wicca is pronounced /ˈwɪkə/.

The European witch trials of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries killed an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people, approximately 80 percent of them women. The Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), published in 1487 by Heinrich Kramer, was the manual used to identify, interrogate, and condemn witches. The Salem witch trials of 1692 — which killed twenty people in colonial Massachusetts — are the best-known American instance, though they were small by European standards. The word witch was, for 300 years, a death sentence.

The rehabilitation of the witch in popular culture began with L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), which distinguished between good witches and bad witches — a moral division absent from earlier European witch mythology. The television show Bewitched (1964–1972) made the witch suburban and comedic. Harry Potter (1997–2007) made witchcraft a school subject. Wicked (2003, musical) gave the villain her own story. Each step moved the witch from monster to protagonist.

The phrase 'witch hunt' — meaning a campaign of persecution against a disfavored group, often based on unfounded accusations — entered political vocabulary in the twentieth century. Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953) used the Salem trials as an allegory for McCarthyism. The phrase is now used so loosely that it has lost its original weight. Calling a congressional investigation a 'witch hunt' trivializes the actual executions the word refers to.