Other forms: warlocks
A warlock is a male worker of dark magic. An old warlock, warlocks and witches, the warlock's tower.
It is the standard male counterpart to witch in fantasy fiction and games, though historically witch itself was used for both sexes. Modern practitioners of Wicca generally reject warlock, because of the word's original meaning, and use witch regardless of gender. Note sorcerer, wizard and mage, which are the neighbouring words, and that each fantasy world assigns them different jobs — a warlock's power is usually borrowed rather than studied.
1nounwarlockA male worker of dark magic.
“The warlock in the story is a librarian for the first hundred pages.”
warlock is a magic worker.
Old English waerloga means oath-breaker — waer, a pledge, plus loga, a liar. A warlock was a traitor before he was a magician, and the modern sense is a Scottish development applied to the devil's servants.
Proto-Indo-European
*weh₁- — true
Proto-West Germanic
*wārulogō — liar
Old English
wǣrloga — traitor, deceiver
Middle English
warloghe
English, today
warlock
Built from
From Middle English warloghe, warlowe, warloȝe, from Old English wǣrloga (“traitor, deceiver”) literally “truce-breaker”, from Proto-West Germanic wārulogō (“liar”), equivalent to wǣr (“covenant, truce, pact, promise”) (from Proto-Indo-European weh₁- (“true”); whence also Latin vērus) + loga (“liar”), from Proto-Germanic lugô, related to Old English lēogan (whence English lie). The hard -ck ending originated in Scottish and Northern English, like the sense "male magic-user" (from the notion that such men were in league with the Devil and had thus broken their baptismal vows / betrayed Christianity). Cognate with Old Saxon wārlogo (“liar, unfaithful or insidious one”). A few writers alternatively propose a derivation from Old Norse varðlokkur (“incantations, charms”) literally “ward songs”, but as the OED notes, this is implausible due to the extreme rarity of the Norse word, the semantic difference, and because forms without hard -k, which are consistent with the Old English etymology (“traitor”), are attested earlier than forms with -k, and forms with -ð- are not attested.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA