Canton

How to spell canton

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce canton

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does canton mean?

1. nounA self-governing territorial division of a country, especially one of the states that make up Switzerland.

Canton in a sentence

• Each canton in Switzerland sets some of its own tax rates.

• The referendum result varied widely from one canton to the next.

Where does canton come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English through French canton, which French had taken from the Italian cantone, meaning 'corner' or 'side district'. The Italian form was an augmentative of canto, 'a corner or angle', which traces back to the Latin cantus, meaning the 'rim' or 'edge' of something, and that Latin word may itself have Celtic roots referring to the rim of a wheel. English adopted it in the late 1500s, at first simply meaning a corner or division of land, and the territorial sense (a self-governing district, most famously in Switzerland) grew from that idea of a marked-off corner of a larger whole. The same canto root sits behind the heraldic 'canton', a corner square on a shield, and even behind 'cantonment', the quartering of troops in a district. Remembering that the word is built on a 'corner' helps fix the single-t, -on spelling rather than any doubled letter.

How the word is built

• cant- (from Italian canto: corner, side)
• -on (augmentative, marking a large corner or district)