cancan

• can-can

Borrowed from French cancan.

cancan (plural cancans)

1. A high-kicking chorus line dance originating in France.
   • 1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, OCLC 1167497017:

     They formed up, in perfect silence, in two lines, facing each other between us and the fire, and then the dance - a sort of infernal and fiendish cancan - began.

2. (motocross) A trick where one leg is brought over the seat, so that both legs are on one side.

cancan (third-person singular simple present cancans, present participle cancanning, simple past and past participle cancanned)

1. To dance the cancan.

Borrowed from French cancan.

• IPA^(key): /kɑnˈkɑn/, /kɑ̃ˈkɑ̃/

• Audio

  (file)

• Hyphenation: can‧can
• Rhymes: -ɑn

cancan m (plural cancans)

1. cancan (French dance)

Borrowed from French cancan.

• IPA^(key): /ˈkɑŋkɑn/, [ˈkɑŋkɑn]
• IPA^(key): /ˈkɑnˌkɑn/, [ˈkɑŋˌkɑn]
• IPA^(key): /ˈkænˌkæn/, [ˈkæŋˌkæn]

cancan

1. cancan

Supposedly, this word originates with a dispute at the Collège de France circa 1550, over whether to use a traditional French pronunciation of Latin or a reconstructed pronunciation of Latin. One of the points of most dispute was the pronunciation of qu, with the word quamquam exemplifying this: it was pronounced in reconstructed Latin as [ˈkʷam.kʷã(m)] but pronounced in French Latin as /kɑ̃.kɑ̃/ ("cancan"). After this debacle, a "cancan" came to be "any kind of scandalous performance".[1]

• IPA^(key): /kɑ̃.kɑ̃/

• Audio

  (file)

cancan m (plural cancans)

1. gossip
2. cancan (dance)

• commérage
• qu'en-dira-t-on
• ragot

• cancaner
• cancaneuse

• “cancan”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

From French cancan.

cancan n (plural cancanuri)

1. gossip

Borrowed from French cancan.

cancan c

1. cancan