passant
/ˈpæsənt/
passant adjective: walking, usually to the right, and looking straight ahead with the right forepaw raised from the ground.
Adjective
passant (not comparable)
- Walking, usually to the right, and looking straight ahead with the right forepaw raised from the ground.
- He them espying, gan himselfe prepare, / And on his arme addresse his goodly shield / That bore a Lion passant in a golden field.1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto I”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
- The official blazon of the arms of Perth is "Gules, a Holy Lambe passant regardant staff and cross argent, with the banner of St. Andrew proper, all within a double tressure counter-flowered of the second": […].1956 July, Col. H. C. B. Rogers, “Railway Heraldry”, in Railway Magazine, page 480
- Currently in use; in vogue.
- Many opinions are passant concerning the basilisk, or little king of serpents, commonly called the cockatrice [...].1646, Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, III.7
Forms of passant
| alternative form | passaunt |
|---|
Origin of passant
From Middle English passaunt (c. 1300), from Old French passant.
Words formed from passant
Words that rhyme with passant
Questions about passant
- What does passant mean?
- Passant means walking, usually to the right, and looking straight ahead with the right forepaw raised from the ground.
- What part of speech is passant?
- Passant is an adjective.
- How do you pronounce passant?
- Passant is pronounced /ˈpæsənt/.
Words near passant in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: passant (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-passant.ogg.
Cite this entry: “passant.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/passant. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.