Romaunt

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A long narrative poem in the medieval tradition, typically recounting tales of adventure, love, or chivalry
2. A verse narrative from the Middle Ages that tells extended stories of knights, romance, or heroic deeds
3. An extended poetic narrative in the medieval style, commonly dealing with romantic or chivalric themes

Etymology: The word "romaunt" entered English from Old French, where "romaunt" was a variant of "romanz," the term for a text written in the vernacular rather than in Latin. Its ultimate source is the Latin adjective "rōmānicus," meaning "Roman," which was formed from "Rōmānus" and passed into Vulgar Latin as "rōmānicē" before developing into the French forms. The sense of "Roman" in this chain was not about the city of Rome as such but about the language: speaking Romance, the everyday tongue descended from Latin, set you apart from those who still used Latin for learning and church business. That shift in meaning is the heart of the story. A "romance" in medieval French came to mean a tale of knightly adventure, and the word "romaunt" in English took on the same literary sense. Over time the Old French word moved from naming a language to naming a kind of story written in it, so a term that once marked a linguistic boundary ended up describing fiction of chivalry and romantic quests.