Chapter Wiseacre to Wit-cracker of W by Webster's Dictionary (1913 Edition)

or libelous.

Milton.

Intemperate wits will spare neither friend nor foe.

L'Estrange.

A wit herself, Amelia weds a wit.

Young.

The five wits, the five senses; also, sometimes, the five qualities or faculties, common wit, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and memory. Chaucer. Nares.

But my five wits nor my five senses can
Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee.

Shak.

Syn. — Ingenuity; humor; satire; sarcasm; irony; burlesque. — Wit, Humor. Wit primarily meant mind; and now denotes the power of seizing on some thought or occurrence, and, by a sudden turn, presenting it under aspects wholly new and unexpected — apparently natural and admissible, if not perfectly just, and bearing on the subject, or the parties concerned, with a laughable keenness and force. "What I want," said a pompous orator, aiming at his antagonist, "is common sense." "Exactly!" was the whispered reply. The pleasure we find in wit arises from the ingenuity of the turn, the sudden surprise it brings, and the patness of its application to the case, in the new and ludicrous relations thus flashed upon the view. Humor is a quality more congenial to the English mind than wit. It consists primarily in taking up the peculiarities of a humorist (or eccentric person) and drawing them out, as Addison did those of Sir Roger de Coverley, so that we enjoy a hearty, good-natured laugh at his unconscious manifestation of whims and oddities. From this original sense the term has been widened to embrace other sources of kindly mirth of the same general character. In a well-known caricature of English reserve, an Oxford student is represented as standing on the brink of a river, greatly agitated at the sight of a drowning man before him, and crying out, "O that I had been introduced to this gentleman, that I might save his life! The, "Silent Woman" of Ben Jonson is one of the most humorous productions, in the original sense of the term, which we have in our language.

Witch
(Witch) n. [Cf. Wick of a lamp.] A cone of paper which is placed in a vessel of lard or other fat, and used as a taper. [Prov. Eng.]

Witch
(Witch), n. [OE. wicche, AS. wicce, fem., wicca, masc.; perhaps the same word as AS. witiga, witga, a soothsayer (cf. Wiseacre); cf. Fries. wikke, a witch, LG. wikken to predict, Icel. vitki a wizard, vitka to bewitch.]

1. One who practices the black art, or magic; one regarded as possessing supernatural or magical power by compact with an evil spirit, esp. with the Devil; a sorcerer or sorceress; — now applied chiefly or only to women, but formerly used of men as well.

There was a man in that city whose name was Simon, a witch.

Wyclif

He can not abide the old woman of Brentford; he swears she's a witch.

Shak.

2. An ugly old woman; a hag. Shak.

3. One who exercises more than common power of attraction; a charming or bewitching person; also, one given to mischief; - - said especially of a woman or child. [Colloq.]

4. (Geom.) A certain curve of the third order, described by Maria Agnesi under the name versiera.

5. (Zoöl.) The stormy petrel.

Witch balls, a name applied to the interwoven rolling masses of the stems of herbs, which are driven by the winds over the steppes of Tartary. Cf. Tumbleweed. Maunder (Treas. of Bot.) — Witches' besoms (Bot.), tufted and distorted branches of the silver fir, caused by the attack of some fungus. Maunder (Treas. of Bot.) — Witches' butter (Bot.), a name of several gelatinous cryptogamous plants, as Nostoc