ppl. a. [f. as prec. + -ING2.] That fascinates, in senses of the vb. Now chiefly, Irresistibly attractive, charming.
1648. W. Montagu, Miscellanea Spiritualia: or Devout Essaies, I. xix. § 5. 353. May judge this severing from such temptations and fascinating vanities, to be a state of real infranchisement, and esteem the other giddy agitation of their persons up and down the world.
1794. Sullivan, View Nat., I. 9. Voltaire, Mirabeau, Helvetius, and many others, whose works you have evidently studied, have fatally decked the plains of libertinism with bewitching and fascinating flowers.
1869. J. Martineau, Ess., II. 111. M. Cousin’s fascinating lectures on the history of philosophy.
Hence Fascinatingly adv.
1835. Tait’s Mag., II. 538/2. We … are, at present, undecided whether to appear before the bench with our enamel smilingly and fascinatingly exposed, or whether to close our lips upon a subject in which the foreign aid of ornament is so much to the credit of our dentist.
1870. Temple Bar Mag., XXIX. May, 191. It is curious to note the different tone adopted by our fast novelists when speaking of their wicked heroes. They let us see, plainly enough, that their heroines, though lovely, bewitching, and fascinatingly attired, are (in their own phraseology) a bad lot, and are the cause of all their own cynical observations about women.
