descant

1. 1.

   a decorative musical accompaniment (often improvised) added above a basic melody

   Synonymsdiscant

   Broaderaccompaniment

Other forms of descant

plural

descants·

past tense

descanted·

present participle

descanting·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about descant

What does descant mean?

descant means "sing in descant". That is the primary sense; the word has 4 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in descant?

descant has 2 syllables: de-scant. The stress falls on "scant".

What is another word for descant?

Close synonyms include yodel, warble, discant. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is descant a common word?

descant is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.