[f. VENTRILOQU-Y + -IST.] One who practises, or is expert in, ventriloquy or ventriloquism; spec. in modern use, one who gives public exhibitions of his skill in this art.
With early quots. cf. prec. 2. The modern application (corresponding to VENTRILOQUISM 1) appears just before 1800.
1656. Blount, Glossogr., Ventriloquist, one that hath an evil spirit speaking in his belly, or one that by use and practise can speak as it were out of his belly, not moving his lips.
1681. H. More, in Glanvill’s Sadducismus, I. Postscr. (1726), 19. Who knows but some of his counterfeit Ventriloquists may prove true ones.
1718. Bp. Hutchinson, Witchcraft, 11. There are also many that can form Words and Voices in their Stomach, which shall seem to come from others rather than the Person that speaks them. Such people are call’d Engastriloques, or Ventriloquists.
1749. Wesley, Wks. (1872), IX. 7. There was a compact … between the ventriloquist and the exorcist.
1797. Encycl. Brit. (ed. 3), XVIII. 639/2. As the ancient ventriloquists, when exercising their art, seemed generally to speak from their own bellies, the name … was abundantly significant.
1815. Stage, I. 176. A ventriloquist at Paris has attracted the attention of the whole metropolis.
1840. Dickens, Old C. Shop, xix. And pale slender women with consumptive faces lingered upon the footsteps of ventriloquists and conjurors.
1893. Ganthony, Pract. Ventriloquism, 147. It is curious that Ventriloquists are nearly all English.
fig. c. 1819. Coleridge, Rem. (1836), II. 317. The scenes are mock dialogues in which the poet solus plays the ventriloquist.
1885. Pall Mall G., 10 Jan., 1/1. The ‘Ventriloquist of Varzin,’ who can pull the strings of three Imperial Chancelleries.
attrib. 1850. N. & Q., Ser. I. II. 101. It can hardly be doubted that the Archbishop’s miracle was a ventriloquist hoax.
b. Applied to birds or animals. Also attrib.
1802. Paley, Nat. Theol., x. 5. A tuneful bird is a ventriloquist. The seat of the song is in the breast.
1879. Jefferies, Wild Life in S. Co., 218. The fact that the call apparently issues from the grass in one place, and yet upon reaching it the bird is not be found, has given rise to the belief that the [corn-]crake is a ventriloquist.
1895. Funk’s Stand. Dict., Onappo (Braz[il]), a reddish-gray nyctipithecine monkey or teetee (Callithrix discolor). Called also ventriloquist-monkey.
