ถ้อยคำชาร์ม (charm)charm

It started as the words themselves. Latin carmen is a song, a verse, a formula — from canere, to sing — and Old French charme is the spell spoken aloud. English has it by about 1300 in that sense only: an incantation. There is no object in the word yet.

The object arrives around 1590, when charm starts to mean any item worn to avert evil. The pleasing-person sense follows in the seventeenth century, and the weaker sense of being highly pleasing in the early eighteenth. The bracelet sense is the newest of the four and can be dated: 1865, for a small object fastened to a watch-chain.

Inference — the drift is from what is said, to what is worn, to what is admired, and the hinge is the same idea each time — a thing with the power to move somebody who is not choosing to be moved. That is also why this atlas files a spoken formula and a hung pendant under one heading without apology: English already did.

Tradition holds — the older English charm was as often spoken over an injury as hung round a neck, and the practical difference between a verse and an object narrows to nothing once the verse is written down and folded into a case.