• Today's Word

Cavort

🔊 Listen to the word Cavort

kuh-VORT

Definition

(verb) To jump or dance around excitedly; to engage in lively, boisterous, or playful activity.

Example

The kids cavorting through the sprinklers in the backyard seemed completely unbothered by the fact that it was nearly dinnertime.

Word Origin

From an American English alteration of curvet — a term from horsemanship describing a specific leap performed by a trained horse, in which the animal raises its forelegs and then kicks out its hind legs before landing. Curvet itself came from Italian corvetta, derived from Latin curvus, meaning “curved” or “bent.” By the early 19th century, cavort had shed its equestrian specificity and broadened into its current sense of general lively, unrestrained movement.

Fun Fact

The word’s equestrian origins are more than etymological trivia — the curvet was one of the most celebrated movements in classical dressage, the highly formalized style of horse training that reached its peak in the Renaissance courts of Europe. The Spanish Riding School in Vienna, founded in the 16th century and still operating today, continues to train horses to perform the curvet and other “airs above the ground” as they were practiced five centuries ago. What we now use casually to describe children splashing in puddles was once the vocabulary of one of Europe’s most refined and aristocratic arts.