WEIRD SISTERS

also called Three Witches, the creatures who prophesy the destinies of the main characters in Shakespeare's Macbeth. The term Weird Sisters was first used by Scots writers as a sobriquet for the Fates of Greek and Roman myth. Through its appearance in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, the expression passed to William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's witches appear four times in the play-twice in the first act, once in the third, and once in the fourth, when they raise apparitions that lead Macbeth to infer that he is invulnerable.