toʊBased on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
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canto (ˈkæntəʊ) ![[Click for IPA pronunciation guide]](http://static.sfdict.com/dictstatic/g/d/dictionary_questionbutton_default.gif) | |
| —n , pl -tos | |
| 1. | music another word for cantus |
| 2. | a main division of a long poem |
| [C16: from Italian: song, from Latin cantus, from canere to sing] | |
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| a screen or mat covered with a dark material for shielding a camera lens from excess light or glare. |
| a stew of meat, vegetables, potatoes, etc. |
canto
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canto
major division of an epic or other long narrative poem. An Italian term, derived from the Latin cantus ("song"), it probably originally indicated a portion of a poem that could be sung or chanted by a minstrel at one sitting. Though early oral epics, such as Homer's, are divided into discrete sections, the name canto was first adopted for these divisions by the Italian poets Dante, Matteo Boiardo, and Ludovico Ariosto. The first long English poem to be divided into cantos was Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590-1609). Lord Byron structured his long poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812) and Don Juan (1819-24) in cantos. An ambitious, unfinished epic by the American poet Ezra Pound is known simply as The Cantos
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