cantons

Noun

canton (plural cantons)

1. A division of a political unit.
   • These three millions live in a small canton of Egypt which cannot maintain twenty thousand people1912, Joseph McCabe (translator), We Must Take Sides; or, The Principle of Action (originally by Voltaire)
   1. One of the states comprising the Swiss Confederation.
   2. An administrative division within a department in France, often being a subdivision of an arrondissement.
      • According to a peasant novelist from the Bourbonnais, this was just as true in the 1840s as it was before the Revolution: "We had not the slightest notion of the outside world. Beyond the limits of the canton, and beyond the known distances, lay mysterious lands that were thought to be dangerous...2007, Graham Robb, quoting an unnamed writer, “Chapter 2: The Tribes of France, I”, in The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, W.W. Norton and Company, →ISBN, page 44
   3. A division of Luxembourg, Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, etc.
   4. (obsolete) A subdivision of a county, of Quebec, Canada; equivalent to a township.
2. A small community or clan.

See all 45 meanings of canton