Word.ws English Dictionary

witch-ridden

witch-ridden adjective: thin and weak; (figuratively) thinly populated.

Adjective

witch-ridden

  1. Thin and weak; (figuratively) thinly populated.
    • Even the chickens on their roosts were witch-ridden,[…]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...
    • 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.1911, Society for Psychical Research (Great Britain), Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, page 88

Origin of witch-ridden

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.

Questions about witch-ridden

What does witch-ridden mean?
Witch-ridden means thin and weak; (figuratively) thinly populated.
What part of speech is witch-ridden?
Witch-ridden is an adjective.

Words near witch-ridden in the dictionary

  1. witch-hunty
  2. witch-knot
  3. witch-knots
  4. witch-like
  5. witch-meal
  6. witch-ridden
  7. witch-smeller
  8. witch-smellers
  9. witcha
  10. Witchampton
  11. witchball

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: witch-ridden (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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