chaunter

plural chaunters

1. UKobsoleteslangA street seller of ballads or similar songs.
2. UKcolloquialobsoleteA deceitful, tricky or corrupt dealer or horse jockey.

   He was a horse chaunter; he's a leg now.

   1836 March – 1837 October, Charles Dickens, chapter 42, in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1837, →OCLC

   1 more example

   the people who live by burning their houses down, and cheating the insurance office: the bill swindlers: the horse chaunters: and so forth. All these people get on somehow; though, happily, it is a well-established rule, that London rogues give themselves the greatest amount of trouble, and produce the smallest results. Lazy men should take to honesty as to an easy-chair

   1860, by Alexander Andrew Knox, Once a Week, How some people get on in London

3. The chanter or flute of a bagpipe.

   No other could wake such detestable groans, With reed and with chaunter-with bag and with drones:

   1868, W.S. Gilbert, The "Bab" Ballads, Ellen McJones Aberdeen

   1 more example

   he biniou is a primitive kind of bagpipe consisting of a leather bag inflated by means of a short valved insufflation tube or blow-pipe, a chaunter with conical bore furnished with a double reed concealed within the stock or socket

   1911, “Biniou”, in Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition, New York, N.Y.: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

4. obsoleteObsolete spelling of chanter

   […]by engaging himself as "Yamaniyah," or chaunter, at funerals.

   1855, Sir Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah