Word.ws English Dictionary

witch's teat

witch's teat noun: a raised bump or wart on a person's body, formerly believed in some English-speaking cultures to indicate that the person was a witch and used the wart to provide blood to familiars.

Noun

witch's teat (plural witch's teats)

  1. A raised bump or wart on a person's body, formerly believed in some English-speaking cultures to indicate that the person was a witch and used the wart to provide blood to familiars.
    • ... a “witch's teat.” A witch's teat was thought to serve the same function as the nipple of a nursing mother, but instead of providing milk to babies, it supplied blood to the witch's evil helpers, or familiars. A committee of[…]2008, Phillip Margulies, Maxine Rosaler, The Devil on Trial: Witches, Anarchists, Atheists, Communists, and Terrorists in America's Courtrooms, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, →ISBN, page 19
    • ... a witch's teat had no counterpart in Continental witchcraft theory. Women, credited because of their “good characters” rather than any professional expertise (though in the 1640s Matthew Hopkins would come to favor midwives), were[…]2010 April 15, Christine L. Krueger, Reading for the Law: British Literary History and Gender Advocacy, University of Virginia Press, →ISBN, page 68

Forms of witch's teat

pluralwitch's teats

Questions about witch's teat

What does witch's teat mean?
Witch's teat means a raised bump or wart on a person's body, formerly believed in some English-speaking cultures to indicate that the person was a witch and used the wart to provide blood to familiars.
What part of speech is witch's teat?
Witch's teat is a noun.
What is the plural of witch's teat?
The plural of witch's teat is witch's teats.

Words near witch's teat in the dictionary

  1. witch's ladders
  2. witch's milk
  3. witch's moneybags
  4. witch's stirrup
  5. witch's stirrups
  6. witch's teat
  7. witch's teats
  8. witch's water
  9. witch-ball
  10. witch-balls
  11. witch-doctor

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: witch's teat (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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