Other forms: pants, panting
To pant is to breathe hard and fast after effort. Shoulders going, mouth open, unable to speak for a moment.
Dogs pant to cool down, since they cannot sweat through their skin, and that is the picture most people have of the word. In people it follows running or climbing. It takes for when the breathing is figurative, as in panting for a drink, and there is a fixed phrase, panting for breath. The noun pants is entirely unrelated and means trousers in American English and underwear in British English.
1verbpantTo breathe quickly and heavily after exertion.
“The dog lay panting in the shade.”
Middle English
panten
English, today
pant
Built from
From Middle English panten. From Middle English panten, whence also English dialectal pank. Possibly from Old French pantoyer, a byform or of Old French pantoisier (“to be breathless”) (compare modern French panteler (“to gasp for breath”)), of uncertain origin. Possibly from Vulgar Latin pantasiō (“struggling for breath when having a nightmare”), from Ancient Greek φαντασιόω (“to be subject to hallucinations”), from φαντασία (“appearance, image, fantasy”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA