Word.ws English Dictionary

cantle

/ˈkantəl/US/ˈkæntəl/

cantle noun: a splinter, slice, or sliver broken off something.

Noun

cantle (plural cantles)

  1. (obsolete) A splinter, slice, or sliver broken off something.
    • See how this river comes me cranking in, / And cuts me from the best of all my land / A huge half-moon, a monstrous cantle out., Act III, Scene i
    • Their armors forged were of metal frail; / On every side thereof huge cantles flies; / The land was strewed all with plate and mail, / That on the earth, on that their warm blood lies.1600, Edward Fairfax (tr.), The Jerusalem Delivered of Tasso, Book VI, xlviii
  2. The raised back of a saddle.
    • He recognised a horse when he saw one, and could do more than fill a cantle.1888, Rudyard Kipling, “The Arrest of Lieutenant Golightly”, in Plain Tales from the Hills, Folio, published 2005, page 93
    • Next day, he returned with a camel-saddle of equal beauty, the long brass horns of its cantles adorned with exquisite old Yemeni engraving.1926, T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
  3. (Scotland) The top of the head.
  4. (Scotland) On many styles of sporran, a metal arc along the top of the pouch, usually fronting the clasp.

Verb

cantle (third-person singular simple present cantles, present participle cantling, simple past and past participle cantled)

  1. (obsolete, transitive) To cut into pieces.
  2. (obsolete, transitive) To cut out from.

cantle meaning in Urdu

cantle in Urdu

گوشہ, قاش

Forms of cantle

Noun
pluralcantles
Verb
third-person singular presentcantles
present participlecantling
past participlecantled
pastcantled

Origin of cantle

From Middle English cantle, cantel, from Old Northern French cantel, Old French chantel (Modern French chanteau, Bourguignon chainteâ), from Medieval Latin cantellus, diminutive of Latin cantus (“corner”). Compare cant (Etymology 3). Kroonen instead connects this term with Dutch kant (“side; edge”) and German Kanz (“mane, upper part of the neck”), deriving them from a Proto-Germanic *kantaz (“side (of the head?); cheek”), connecting it to the Baltic words Lithuanian žandas (“cheek, jaw”) and Latvian zuods (“chin, jaw”), all from a hypothetical Proto-Indo-European *ǵond-o-.

Questions about cantle

What does cantle mean?
Cantle means a splinter, slice, or sliver broken off something.
What is cantle in Urdu?
Cantle in Urdu is گوشہ, قاش. See Cantle meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is cantle?
Cantle can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce cantle?
Cantle is pronounced /ˈkantəl/ (UK).
What is the plural of cantle?
The plural of cantle is cantles.

Words near cantle in the dictionary

  1. cantions
  2. cantish
  3. cantitruncated
  4. cantitruncation
  5. cantitruncations
  6. cantle
  7. cantled
  8. cantles
  9. cantlet
  10. cantlets
  11. Cantley

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cantle (page history and authors); cantle (Urdu Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-cantle.wav.

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