Crossword clues for prestidigitator
prestidigitator
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Prestidigitator \Pres`ti*dig"i*ta`tor\, n. [L. praesto ready + digitus finger: cf. F. prestidigitateur.] One skilled in legerdemain or sleight of hand; a juggler.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1843, from French prestidigitateur, a hybrid coined 1830 by Jules de Rovère (who sought a new word, "qui s'accorderait mieux à ses nobles origines" to replace escamoteur and physicien), roughly based on Latin praestigiator "juggler" (see prestigious); influenced by Italian presto "quick," a conjuror's word (see presto), and by Latin digitus "finger" (see digit).
Wiktionary
n. One who performs feats of prestidigitation, a sleight-of-hand artist, a magician
WordNet
n. someone who performs magic tricks to amuse an audience [syn: magician, conjurer, conjuror, illusionist]
Usage examples of "prestidigitator".
There almost invariably comes a moment during the exercise of my profession when the prestidigitator will seem to pause.
The prestidigitator and the audience have entered into what I term the Pact of Acquiescent Sorcery.
My skill as a prestidigitator simply became irrelevant to our feelings about each other.
He was born in Derbyshire in 1857, but had moved to London at a young age, where he had subsequently worked for many years as an illusionist and prestidigitator, achieving a considerable measure of success.
The prestidigitator folded the box, mirror-concealed compartment inside.
Cincinnati now-looked up, wondering why the prestidigitator had stopped in mid-sentence.
Although he carried neither bag nor pack and appeared to have nothing whatever in his pockets, he proceeded, like a professional prestidigitator, to produce from his shabby clothing an extraordinary number of curious things--a black tin can with a wire handle, a small box of matches, a soiled package which I soon learned contained tea, a miraculously big dry sausage wrapped in an old newspaper, and a clasp-knife.
It came much too fast, of course, for the hand of cacoastrum, the ultimate prestidigitator, is quicker even than the eye of the Firstborn.
By the age of five, the pint-sized prodigy was apprenticed to Signor Blitz, the greatest of all the magicians in the world, and by his twelfth year, the precocious prestidigitator was the favorite of the sultans and sheiks of far-away lands.
Eelmongers and bread carts competed for attention, along with the impoverished prestidigitators who went from door to door offering their skills.
Maximus, for example, was a student of the occult sciences and theurgy, while Eusebius claimed that such practices were the work of charlatans, prestidigitators, and the insane, who had been led astray into the exercise of certain dark powers.
A clever conjurer is welcome anywhere, and those of us whose powers of entertainment are limited to the setting of booby-traps or the arranging of apple-pie beds must view with envy the much greater tribute of laughter and applause which is the lot of the prestidigitator with some natural gift for legerdemain.
No ordinary slum, this, although the huts built out of old packing cases and pieces of corrugated tin and shreds of jute sacking which stood higgledy‑piggledy in the shadow of the mosque looked no different from any other shanty‑town… because this was the ghetto of the magicians, yes, the very same place which had once spawned a Hummingbird whom knives had pierced and pie‑dogs had failed to save… the conjurers' slum, to which the greatest fakirs and prestidigitators and illusionists in the land continually flocked, to seek their fortune in the capital city.
First, there are the sleight-of-hand artists, the prestidigitators, the jugglers, the illusionists-people who entertain their audiences with dexterity and physical skill.