Word.ws English Dictionary

myomancy

myomancy noun: divination by interpreting rats or mice. Their cries were believed to indicate the presence of evil.

Noun

myomancy (uncountable)

  1. Divination by interpreting rats or mice. Their cries were believed to indicate the presence of evil.
    • Myomancy was a method of divination by rats and mice, and is supposed to be alluded to in Isaiah lxvi. 17. Their peculiar cries, or some marked devastation committed by them, was taken for a prognostic of evil.1855 Elihu Rich in Smedley et al. Occult Sci.
    • Pliny has a chapter on myomancy, or soothsaying by means of rats and mince, (Nat. Hist., lib. ix. c. 57).1865, Samuel Lysons, Our British Ancestors: Who and what Were They?

Origin of myomancy

From Ancient Greek μῦς (mûs, “mouse”); myo- + -mancy.

Questions about myomancy

What does myomancy mean?
Myomancy means divination by interpreting rats or mice. Their cries were believed to indicate the presence of evil.
What part of speech is myomancy?
Myomancy is a noun.

Words near myomancy in the dictionary

  1. myologists
  2. myology
  3. myolyses
  4. myolysis
  5. myoma
  6. myomancy
  7. myomas
  8. myomata
  9. myomatous
  10. myomectomies
  11. myomectomy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: myomancy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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