From Old English 'wicca' (male) / 'wicce' (female sorcerer) — both collapsed into one genderless word.
A person, especially a woman, thought to have magic powers; historically, a practitioner of sorcery or maleficent magic.
From Old English 'wicca' (masculine, a male sorcerer) and 'wicce' (feminine, a female sorcerer), from Proto-Germanic *wikkjaz (one who wakes the dead, a necromancer), possibly from PIE *weg- (to be lively, to wake). The masculine 'wicca' and feminine 'wicce' both became 'witch' in Middle English when grammatical gender collapsed. The modern religion 'Wicca' (revived 1954) takes
Old English had separate words for male and female witches: 'wicca' (male) and 'wicce' (female). When English lost grammatical gender, both collapsed into 'witch.' The modern religion Wicca (founded by Gerald Gardner in 1954) took the masculine Old English form — so 'Wicca' technically means 'male witch.' The word 'wicked' may