Word.ws English Dictionary

can-can

can-can is the alternative spelling of cancan.

Meaning of cancan

Noun

cancan (plural cancans)

  1. A high-kicking chorus line dance originating in France.
    • They formed up, in perfect silence, in two lines, facing each other between us and the fire, and then the dance - a sort of infernal and fiendish cancan - began.1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC
    1. (broadly) "Galop Infernal", a movement from Jacques Offenbach's opera Orpheus in the Underworld, commonly associated with and called the cancan.
  2. A trick where one leg is brought over the seat, so that both legs are on one side.

See all 4 meanings of cancan

Forms of can-can

pluralcan-cans

Questions about can-can

What is can-can the alternative spelling of?
Can-can is the alternative spelling of cancan.

Words near can-can in the dictionary

  1. Can-abong
  2. Can-adieng
  3. Can-aga
  4. Can-Am
  5. Can-Ams
  6. can-can
  7. can-cans
  8. can-do
  9. can-do-ness
  10. can-doer
  11. can-doers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: can-can (page history and authors); cancan (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “can-can.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/can-can. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.