After watching the movie, my 10-year old daughter asked me what the word meant. I said it’s a verb adapted as a noun to mean a magical creation or summoning. Before you speak, I admit I never looked up the work (meaning the verb) in Webster’s. My definition was strictly in the fiction universe (Xanth, Harry Potter, etc.) But then my girl went to the Ipad and came up with a meaning that surprised me. The verb more often means to implore or beseech. The magical meaning is a minor definition.
Either your daughter or the ipad is confused…you had the most common definition.
What dictionary did she use online? Here is dictionary.com’s entry:
con·jure
[kon-jer, kuhn- for 1–5, 8–10, 12; kuhn-joor for 6, 7, 11] Show IPA verb, con·jured, con·jur·ing, noun
verb (used with object)
1.
to affect or influence by or as if by invocation or spell.
2.
to effect, produce, bring, etc., by or as by magic: to conjure a miracle.
3.
to call upon or command (a devil or spirit) by invocation or spell.
4.
to call or bring into existence by or as if by magic (usually followed by up ): She seemed to have conjured up the person she was talking about.
5.
to bring to mind; recall (usually followed by up ): to conjure up the past.
All of the definitions except the last one indicate that magic is implied ( at least to me - "as if by a spell, as if by magic, " etc.) I wouldn’t call the magical meaning minor. It’s pretty clearly the “main” definition.
Just typing “define conjuring” into Googe brings us this:
con·jur·ing
ˈkänjəriNG,ˈkən-/
noun
noun: conjuring
1.
the performance of tricks that are seemingly magical, typically involving sleight of hand.
"a conjuring trick"
The non-magical meaning seems to be the original one. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, “to conjure” originally meant to conspire or swear oaths together, but later came to be used particularly of conspiring with demons (or possibly sometimes more benign types of spirits) and getting them to do your bidding. Magic as thought to be largely done by people getting demons to so their bidding. However, few people today seriously believe in that sort of thing (even people who do believe in some supernatural stuff), so I should think that by far the most common use of the word now is to describe the tricks of a magician-entertainer (who does not generally seriously pretend to have actual magical powers, and certainly does not pretend to be conspiring with demons).
Indeed, to my mind, in modern English “conjuring” more unambiguously implies tricks, fakery performed for entertainment purposes, than does" magic", which is still sometimes used to refer to actual supernatural powers that many people once believed in (and a few still do). I might say that superstitious tribesmen believe their shaman to be a real magician, whereas you and I believe him to be a mere conjurer, using trickery to impress and fool them. Likewise, Harry Potter, in the stories, does magic and not conjuring.