witch-ridden
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Originally used to describe horses that remained thin and did not thrive despite feeding, from the notion in folklore that witches rode (and tired out) such horses at night.
Adjective
[edit]- Thin and weak; (figuratively) thinly populated.
- 1877, James Melville Beard, K. K. K. Sketches, Humorous and Didactic Treating the More Important Events of the Ku-Klux-Klan Movement in the South With a Discussion of the Causes Which Gave Rise to It and the Social and Political Issues Emanating From It, Library of Alexandria, →ISBN:
- Even the chickens on their roosts were witch-ridden, […]
- 1911, Society for Psychical Research (Great Britain), Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, page 88:
- Mrs. Piper would be a much more convincing apparition if she could have come to us out of the blue, instead of trailing behind her a nebulous ancestry of magnetic somnambules, witch-ridden children, and ecstatic nuns.
- 2012 May 23, R. T. Davies, Four Centuries of Witch Beliefs (RLE Witchcraft), Routledge, →ISBN:
- Parliament in the seventeenth century an unsatisfactory barometer of public opinion because the franchise was irregularly distributed and the witch-ridden south-east over-represented.