Definition of "forspeak" in Anglais

verb

1. (transitive, dialectal, Northern England and Scotland) To injure or cause bad luck through immoderate praise or flattery; to affect with the curse of an evil tongue, which brings ill luck upon all objects of its praise.

2. (transitive, obsolete) To bewitch, to charm.

   • This Examinat confesseth that shee came to Ioane Gylles house, her Child being sicke, and that shee intreated this Examinat to look on the Child, and to tell her whether it was forspoken or no, and this Examinat said it was forspoken; but when the said Child died she cannot tell.
   • Some call me witch, / And being ignorant of myself, they go / About to teach me how to be one; urging / That my bad tongue—by their bad usage made so— / Forspeaks their cattle, doth bewitch their corn, / Themselves, their servants, and their babes at nurse.
   • Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the cunning man’s medical dealings was his readiness to diagnose a supernatural cause for the patient’s malady by saying that he was haunted by an evil spirit, a ghost, or ‘fairy’, or that he had been ‘overlooked’, ‘forspoken’, or, in plainer language, bewitched. Thus if any inhabitant of mid-sixteenth-century Maidstone suspected that he had been forspoken, he would go off for advice to one Kiterell, a sorcerer who lived at Bethersden, and specialised in such things: …

3. (transitive, obsolete) To forbid, to prohibit; to oppose.

4. (transitive, obsolete) To say bad things about; to slander.

verb

1. (transitive, obsolete) Alternative spelling of forespeak.