Chant

How to spell chant

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce chant

What does chant mean?

1. verbTo recite or sing words in a repeated, rhythmic way, often in unison.
2. nounA repeated rhythmic phrase or a piece of music sung on a few notes.

Chant in a sentence

• verb

  The crowd began to chant the player's name after the goal.

• noun

  A steady chant rose from the supporters in the stands.

• verb

  The monks would chant the same passage every morning at dawn.

• noun

  The choir performed an ancient chant during the service.

Where does chant come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English from the Old French verb chanter, meaning 'to sing', which English speakers adopted in the late 1300s. The French form descended from the Latin cantare, 'to sing', a frequentative of canere that carried the sense of singing again and again or singing habitually. The same Latin root has left a remarkable family of English words, including 'canticle', 'cantata', 'incantation', and even 'chanter', the melody pipe of a set of bagpipes. The 'ch' spelling, pronounced as a soft 'ch' rather than a hard 'k', is a clear fingerprint of the French stage of the journey, since French had softened the original Latin hard c. Because the modern meaning settled on rhythmic, repeated singing or recitation, the word still echoes the 'sing it over and over' force of its Latin frequentative ancestor.

How the word is built

• chant (from Latin cantare: to sing repeatedly)