cant
Other forms: canting; canted; cants
Cant is language repeated so often and so mechanically that it's essentially empty of meaning. Cant can also mean the specialized jargon of a particular group — like the "cant of piracy" (e.g., Ahoy! Lubber! Arrr!).
Possible sources for cant exist in both Irish Gaelic and Latin, and the meanings of both are similar: caint is "speech," while cantare is "to sing." In broader English, the word was first used to mock the singing of monks. As it evolved, cant became the whining of beggars and then the secret language of thieves, and the negative connotations persist in modern usage. As a verb, cant has a completely different meaning: it means to lean or tilt to one side.
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a slope in the turn of a road or track; the outside is higher than the inside in order to reduce the effects of centrifugal force
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a sloping edge where two surfaces meet at an angle other than 90 degrees
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heel over
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a characteristic language of a particular group (as among thieves)types:street nameslang for something (especially for an illegal drug)rhyming slangslang that replaces words with rhyming words or expressions and then typically omits the rhyming componenttype of:non-standard speechspeech that differs from the usual accepted, easily recognizable speech of native adult members of a speech community
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insincere talk about religion or moralssynonyms: pious platitude
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stock phrases that have become nonsense through endless repetitionsynonyms: buzzword
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Vocabulary lists containing cant
The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.
The origins of slang are unknown, but it was first used to describe the specialized words used by members of a specific group or trade. Learn this list of terms related to the informal language that groups use casually among themselves.
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