Cant

How to spell cant

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cant

What does cant mean?

1. nounHypocritical or sanctimonious language, or the private jargon of a particular group.
2. nounA slope, tilt, or sloping edge of a surface.
3. verbTo tip or tilt something so that it leans onto its edge or to one side.

Cant in a sentence

• noun

  The politician's speech was empty cant about family values.

• noun

  The road was built with a slight cant to let rainwater drain away.

• verb

  The workers had to cant the heavy crate onto its corner to move it.

• noun

  Critics dismissed the report as fashionable cant dressed up as analysis.

• noun

  The surveyor measured the cant of the embankment before approving the design.

• verb

  A sudden gust made the small boat cant sharply to the left.

Where does cant come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This short word actually braids together two separate threads. The older noun, meaning hypocritical or insincere talk, comes from the Latin verb cantare, meaning 'to sing' or 'to chant', and it reached English in the 1500s through the whining, sing-song begging speech of vagrants, so that 'cant' first described the secret jargon of thieves and beggars before it widened to mean any pious, hollow phrasing. The separate sense of a slant or tilt comes from a different root, the Latin canthus, meaning the iron rim of a wheel or the corner of the eye, which passed through Dutch and Low German to mean an edge or sloping side, and from there became a verb for tipping something onto its edge. Because both senses collapsed into the same four letters, English ended up with one spelling covering very different ideas. The singing root is still visible in relatives like 'chant', 'cantata' and 'incantation'. The chief modern spelling trap is not the word itself but its frequent collision with the contraction 'can't', from which it differs only by the missing apostrophe.

How the word is built

• cant (from Latin cantare: to sing, chant); the tilt sense from Latin canthus: rim, corner

Words that sound like cant

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• can't: The contracted form of 'cannot', expressing inability or impossibility.