Scot glamour, alteration of grammar, influenced in spelling by medieval Latin glomeria grammar. Glamour is first recorded in the 18th cent. in the phrase to cast the glamour over ‘to put a spell on’. In the 19th cent. the word came to mean ‘enchantment, a magical or deceptive beauty or charm’; the sense of physical or sexual attractiveness originated in the USA in the early 20th cent. The association of grammar with magic probably arose because grammar was used in connection with the study of Latin, the language of scholarship in the Middle Ages. The uneducated, who did not understand Latin, tended to regard it and learning expressed in it with suspicion. While the English word grammar has never explicitly been linked with magic, a related Middle English word gramarye, which originally meant ‘grammar’, was later applied to learning in general and by the 15th cent. specifically to knowledge of astrology and the occult