Cant
Cant noun - The special terms or expressions of a particular group or field.
Usage example: the colorful cant used by movie producers and publicity agents in Hollywood
Speech
Speech noun - The stock of words, pronunciation, and grammar used by a people as their basic means of communication.
Usage example: wanting to develop a writing system for his people, Sequoya created a system of 86 symbols representing all the syllables of Cherokee speech
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Synonyms for Speech
Nearby Word: speechless
Mutual synonyms
How words are described
| single | single cant | single speech |
Both words in one sentence
- To make matters worse, most of the books were written in-universe style, slathering virtually every character's speech with cant, and that was the writers' single favorite word.
Source: Did Not Do the Bloody Research -
The most humorous of these changes is the ancient High Speech; when an example of it is given, it's quickly recognizable to readers as the silly-sounding thieves' cant used by a few characters in the original trilogy.
Source: Literature / Wax And Wayne - The most humorous of these changes is the ancient High Speech; when an example of it is given, it's quickly recognizable to readers as the silly-sounding thieves' cant used by Spook in the original trilogy, which nobody but he could really understand all that well.
Source: Legend Fades to Myth
Cite this Source
Speech and Cant. (2016). Retrieved 2026, August 16, from https://thesaurus.plus/related/cant/speech
Cant & Speech. N.p., 2016. Web. 16 Aug. 2026. <https://thesaurus.plus/related/cant/speech>.
Speech or Cant. 2016. Accessed August 16, 2026. https://thesaurus.plus/related/cant/speech.
Google Ngram Viewer shows how "cant" and "speech" have occurred on timeline