Word.ws English Dictionary

cento

cento noun: a hotchpotch, a mixture; especially a piece made up of quotations from other authors, or a poem containing individual lines from other poems.

Noun

cento (plural centos or centones)

  1. A hotchpotch, a mixture; especially a piece made up of quotations from other authors, or a poem containing individual lines from other poems.
    • But, Sʳ, I will no longer tire your patience wᵗʰ these monsters (the subject of every contemptuous pamphlet) then with the madness of the Anabaptists, Quakers, Fift Monarchy-men, and a cento of unheard of heresies besides, which, at present, deform the once renowned Church of England, and approach...1659, John Evelyn, “A Character of England, as It was Lately Presented in a Letter to a Nobleman of France. […] The Third Edition.”, in William Upcott, compiler, The Miscellaneous Writings of John...
    • Now look out in the Gradus for Purus, and you find as the first synonime, lacteus; for coloratus, and the first synonime is purpureus. I mention this by way of elucidating one of the most ordinary processes in the ferrumination of these centos.1817, S[amuel] T[aylor] Coleridge, “The Motives of the Present Work—Reception of the Author’s First Publication—The Discipline of His Taste at School—The Effect of Contemporary Writers on Youthful...

Examples of cento in a sentence

  • And Captain McCabe says: "I have always regarded the letter as a sort of 'cento' of odds and ends (badly put together) from Lee's genuine letters."1915 September, Charles A. Graves, “The Forged Letter of General Lee”, in Southern Historical Society Papers, New Series, number 40, page...
  • Paradise Lost, as Teskey observes, is a cento, a vast echo chamber of classical texts, all twisted into new shapes.2007, William Poole, “Out of his Furrow”, in London Review of Books, volume 29, number 3, page 16:

Forms of cento

pluralcentos
pluralcentones

Origin of cento

From Latin cento (“patchwork garment”).

Words formed from cento

Questions about cento

What does cento mean?
Cento means a hotchpotch, a mixture; especially a piece made up of quotations from other authors, or a poem containing individual lines from other poems.
How do you use cento in a sentence?
And Captain McCabe says: "I have always regarded the letter as a sort of 'cento' of odds and ends (badly put together) from Lee's genuine letters."
What part of speech is cento?
Cento is a noun.
What is the plural of cento?
The plural of cento is centos.

Words near cento in the dictionary

  1. centistokes
  2. centiwatt
  3. centiwatts
  4. centner
  5. centners
  6. cento
  7. Centofanti
  8. Centofantis
  9. centoism
  10. centoist
  11. centoists

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cento (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: “cento.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cento. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.