Word.ws English Dictionary

machicotage

machicotage noun: a style of singing, especially of sacred music, cultivated from the late Middle Ages until the 19th century, centered on Paris, and derived from the Gallican ritual; in this style vocal lines are decorated with improvised ornamentation, and differentiated from each other in a polyphonic composition also by tone color.

Noun

machicotage (uncountable)

  1. (archaic, rare) A style of singing, especially of sacred music, cultivated from the late Middle Ages until the 19th century, centered on Paris, and derived from the Gallican ritual; in this style vocal lines are decorated with improvised ornamentation, and differentiated from each other in a polyphonic composition also by tone color.
    • A similar practice in French cathedrals, called machicotage, is documented from 1391 through at least the eighteenth century.1995, Peter Jeffery, Re-Envisioning Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study of Gregorian Chant

Questions about machicotage

What does machicotage mean?
Machicotage means a style of singing, especially of sacred music, cultivated from the late Middle Ages until the 19th century, centered on Paris, and derived from the Gallican ritual; in this style vocal lines are decorated with improvised ornamentation, and differentiated from each other in a polyphonic composition also by tone color.
What part of speech is machicotage?
Machicotage is a noun.

Words near machicotage in the dictionary

  1. machicolated
  2. machicolates
  3. machicolating
  4. machicolation
  5. machicolations
  6. machicotage
  7. machicote
  8. machicotes
  9. machicoulis
  10. machicoulises
  11. Machida

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: machicotage (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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