1856 G. Henderson Pop. Rhymes Berwick 43 ‘An old hexe’, means an old witch, and is often applied, in a bad sense, to females of the present day.

1920 S. Lewis Main St. xiii. 159 I couldn't talk to you without twenty old hexes watching, whispering.

1928 Daily Express 10 Dec. 11/1 York County's early settlers were Germans, and their present-day descendants still remain under the spell of medieval German necromancy. One of their sacred words is ‘hex’, said to be corrupt German for witch.

1935 Amer. Speech 10 170/1 Hex, a witch..the hex trial at Lancaster.

1909 Sat. Evening Post 16 Jan. 7/1 ‘Old pal’, agreed J. Rufus, ‘the hex is sure on me’.

1942 D. Powell Time to be Born (1943) xiii. 326 She could count on winning him... Unless Julian really could put a hex on her.

1951 M. Lowry Let. Apr. or May (1967) 234 Everything from how to put the hex on your more troublesome pupils [etc.].

1952 M. McCarthy Groves of Academe (1953) xii. 237 She hoped..that the hex signs on the neighbouring barns would serve to ward off all evil influences from the vicinity and not, as the ignorant sometimes thought, to attract them or indicate their presence.

1958 Times 4 Oct. 8/7 If Ladan stayed Shehu would gather up his robes and depart, leaving a hex on us all.

1966 Punch 30 Mar. 458/3 ‘What?’ says the young man, picking it up gingerly and nervously, half afraid she's put a hex on it.

1968 Word Study Oct. 6/1 Each of us carries around a set of shibboleths..with..totemic reverence..; meanwhile we trample blithely on spells and hexes we have never heard of.

1956 S. Glasstone Princ. Nucl. Reactor Engin. viii. 449 For use in nuclear energy work, uranium is generally required either in the form of uranium metal, for fabrication into fuel elements, or as hexafluoride (‘hex’) to constitute the feed for the separation of the isotopes by the gaseous-diffusion method.

1964 M. Gowing Brit. & Atomic Energy 1939–45 ii. 63 Secrecy in the project now and later was aided by the elaborate code systems used. These were different in different groups... Hexafluoride was known variously as ‘ Vi’, ‘hex’ and ‘the working gas’.

1971 New Scientist 16 Sept. 617/2 Uranium hexafluoride (‘hex’ for short) is pumped through a cascade of..thousands of membranes.

1975 IBM Techn. Disclosure Bull. Sept. 1155 A device which utilizes 16 lines to indicate its status..may have the lines displayed as 4 hex characters, each of which represent 4 lines.

1978 Pract. Computing July–Aug. 12/1 He can visualize several lines of assembly code complete with hex equivalents and displacements.

1984 Personal Software Winter 42/3 The hex code for an inverse space is 80.

1986 Personal Computer World Nov. 108/3 Carl's utility shows the data on each sector in hex, with an ASCII dump in parallel.

1982 E. Peters Mountaineering (ed. 4) xi. 225 A hex has three or four widths, depending on whether the hexagonal shape is regular or irregular.

1998 On the Edge May 31/1 I managed to secure a very large hex in a deep crack above my head and clipped the rope onto it.

2012 Dominion Post (Wellington, N.Z.) (Nexis) 15 Sept. 32 Our harnesses resemble hula skirts, ringed..with..a wide array of climbing gear—karabiners, belay devices, cams, nuts, hexes and slings.

1830 J. F. Watson Ann. Philadelphia 232 A decent store~keeper once got him to hex for his wife, who had conceited that an old Mrs. Wiggand had bewitched her, and made her to swallow a piece of linseywoolsey.

1932 B. De Voto Mark Twain's Amer. iii. 74 The cat is hexen: it is approved by Mother Hawkins, a witch.

1935 Language 11 147 Belief in witchcraft is fast disappearing and with it the word [hɛks] to bewitch or a witch or wizard. A countryman may still say: My pigs are hext.

1956 H. Gold Man who was not with It (1965) xi. 97 I stood hexing the cars on Route One.