chant

present singular third person chants · participle present chanting · participle past chanted · past chanted · alternative chaunt

1. To sing, especially without instruments, and as applied to monophonic and pre-modern music.

   the cherefull birds of sundry kind / Do chaunt sweet musick, to delight his mind

   1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto VII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 3

2. To sing or intone sacred text.
3. To utter or repeat in a strongly rhythmical manner, especially as a group.

   The football fans chanted insults at the referee.

   1 more example

   On their way to Parliament Square, the demonstrators chanted slogans, sang the Hungarian national anthem, and waved banners and Hungarian flags (minus the hated Communist emblem).

   2009, Leo J. Daugherty III, The Marine Corps and the State Department, page 116

4. archaictransitiveTo sell horses fraudulently, exaggerating their merits.

plural chants · alternative chaunt

1. Type of singing done generally without instruments and harmony.
2. entertainmentA short and simple melody to which unmetrical psalms, etc., are sung or recited.
   1. AnglicanismentertainmentA harmonized melody used in Anglican chant, usually split into two two-bar phrases, to which the words of a psalm are sung by a choir; typically, each musical phrase corresponds to the text of half of a verse.
3. Twang; manner of speaking; a canting tone.

   His strange face, his strange chant.

   1849–1861, Thomas Babington Macaulay, chapter XVII, in The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, volume (please specify |volume=I to V), London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, →OCLC

4. A repetitive song, typically an incantation or part of a ritual.

plural Chants

1. A surname from French.