Other forms: chants, chanting, chanted
A chant is a short phrase said over and over in a steady, half-sung rhythm, and it is rarely one voice. A crowd behind the goal with four words and a drumbeat; a line of protesters outside a ministry saying the same thing for an hour.
It is a verb as well: they chanted his name for a full minute after the final whistle. The word reaches the other end of the room too, because in church a chant is a line sung on one or two notes, and Gregorian chant is the famous kind. So it covers the stadium and the monastery, and what links them is repetition rather than tune. A song has a melody; a chant has a rhythm and hardly any melody at all.
1nounchantA short phrase repeated in a rhythmic, half-sung voice by a group of people.
“The same chant went round the stadium for ten minutes.”
2nounsimpleA simple line of music sung on very few notes in a religious service.
“The service opened with a chant in Latin.”
3verbsingTo say or sing something over and over in a rhythm.
“Protesters chanted outside the gates until it got dark.”
Chant came through Old French chanter from Latin canto, to sing. It is a doublet of cant, the same Latin word reaching English twice by different roads, and what chant kept is the narrow part of singing: a line held on almost one note.
Proto-Indo-European
*keh₂n-
Latin
canto — sing
Old French
chanter
Middle English
chaunten
English, today
chant
From Middle English chaunten, from Old French chanter, from Latin canto (“sing”). a doublet of cant.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA