recanter

Also found in: Thesaurus.

Related to recanter: raconteur

re·cant

(rĭ-kănt′)

v. re·cant·ed, re·cant·ing, re·cants

v.tr.

To make a formal retraction or disavowal of (a statement or belief to which one has previously committed oneself).

v.intr.

To make a formal retraction or disavowal of a previously held statement or belief.

[Latin recantāre : re-, re- + cantāre, to sing, frequentative of canere; see kan- in Indo-European roots.]

re′can·ta′tion (rē′kăn-tā′shən) n.

re·cant′er n.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

References in periodicals archive ?

According to one account, "Stubbs after his Right Hand was cut off, put off his Hat with his Left, and said with a loud Voice, God save the Queen." (56) Far from being the act of a crazed zealot or a servile recanter, this was a means of publicly testifying that opposition to a French marriage was a loyalist rather than treasonable act--a further reminder that, as much recent scholarship has suggested, the early modern theatre of punishment was much more unstable and less uniformly normative than traditionally assumed.

"God's hat" and the highwayman's shoes: a gestural and sartorial history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English trial and execution

Briony the recanter lacks the power of Briony the accuser.

Atonement

In November 1926 (in Enigma) Mrs Burkholder came close to perfection with words from a single dictionary: Agaricus (genus) generant anaconda recanter ironwort cantonal underage (Webster2 is needed to avoid hyphen) startled.