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Geomancy is the belief that the way you set out a home, house, or office can bring good luck or bad luck. People talk about doors, beds, desks, and which way a building faces, as if the arrangement itself could help or harm you. In everyday English, especially in books, this is often the meaning they want. Though actually the older Western meaning was a bit different: it was a way of telling the future from the earth — marks in the ground, or patterns of dots treated as earth-signs. English later borrowed the word for the Chinese idea of arranging space for luck, so the tidy dictionary line and the old scholar's meaning are not quite the same thing. Some careful writers still keep them apart. In loose talk, geomancy and feng shui get used as if they were twins.
風水（日常對應詞；西文古義其實是「看地占卜」，和風水不是同一套）
組成geo- (earth) + -mancy (fortune-telling). From Middle English geomancie, from Medieval Latin geomantia, from Greek geōmanteía.
同家族的字
- geographyshares geo-, 'earth'
- necromancyshares -mancy, 'telling the future'
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
geomancynoun/ˈdʒiːəʊˌmænsi/
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A method of divination using earth or the ground, such as interpreting markings on the ground or how handfuls of dirt land when tossed.
- 1660 Urquhart tr. Rabelais Gargantua & Pantagruel iii. xxv. Hard by here, in the Brown-wheat-Island, dwelleth Her Trippa; you know how by the Arts of Astrology, Geomancy, Chiromancy, Metopomancy, and others of a like stuff and nature, he foretelleth all things to come...
- The Arabian Geomancy, said to have been first practised by Almadul, was more recondite, being founded on the effects of motion under the crust of the earth, the chinks thus produced, and the noises or thunderings heard; its foundation was the dogma of Aristotle, that "the moving of the heaven is everlasting, and is the beginning and cause of all inferior movings."
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feng shui; Chinese geomancy.
- geomancy [...] The pretended art of divining future events, or of ascertaining the luckiness or unluckiness of any event or locality, by means of signs connected with the earth [...] or, as in China, from the configuration and aspect of a particular region in its relation to some other.
- There was [...] a striking similarity between Mesopotamian and Chinese thinking - if not method - in the concept of feng-shui, the Chinese system of geomancy, or divination by topographical features.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。