incentive [LME] Modern management gurus may not realize it, but when they advocate incentives they are invoking magic. The word is closely related to incantation [LME], ‘words said as a magic spell or charm’. The root of both is Latin incantare ‘to chant, charm’, from cantare ‘to sing’, the source also of chant [LME]. In the general sense ‘a thing that motivates or encourages someone to do something’, incentive entered English in the Middle Ages, but it took until the 1940s for incentives to be offered to workers. The first incentive payments were proposed in early 1940 as a way to encourage US farmers to plant new crops. See also enchant.