romaunt means A romantic story told in verse; a romance.
romaunt is pronounced /ɹəˈmɔːnt/.
Why “romaunt” is a great word
A romantic story or tale, especially one written in verse, from Anglo-French romaunt, a variant of Old French romant, romanz ("verse narrative"), itself from Vulgar Latin *romanice ("in the Roman manner"). Unlike "romance," which broadened to cover any narrative of adventure and love, or "ballad," which compresses drama into a brief, singable episode, the romaunt is an archaic vessel for a long, metrical elaboration of the amorous. It is the rhythmic clatter of a knight's charger, the glint of a silken sleeve in torchlight, and the formal, whispered vow exchanged before dawn—a structured artifice where language, enchanted with its own cadence, becomes the world it describes.
Etymology
From Old French romaunt (modern roman), variant of romanz.
noun
- A romantic story told in verse; a romance.e.g.“They are forbidden to read, save what their Superior permitted[…]; but lo! their ears are at the command of idle minstrels, and their eyes study empty romaunts.” — 1819, Walter Scott, “Ivanhoe”, in The Waverley Novels, Volume IV, published 1844, page 612:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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