Otters cavorted in the stream. children cavorting on the first sunny day of spring
Recent Examples on the WebThe best divers and gymnasts can be awfully feline in their flips; NASA, too, has looked to cats to teach astronauts to cavort through gravity-free space. Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic, 13 Sep. 2022 In America, the film ran into surprisingly little censorship trouble, despite the blood, the vulgarity, and a risqué scene where the German soldiers cavort with a bevy of friendly French girls. Thomas Doherty, The Hollywood Reporter, 13 Sep. 2022 Soon conversation turned to a club in Japan where women are said to cavort with octopuses.New York Times, 15 Apr. 2022 Of the several hundred attendees celebrating the freedom to cavort without masks or social distancing, at least 72 came down with COVID over the following few days. Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 19 Apr. 2022 The license to cavort and disregard the strictures of Lent is Ireland's version of Carnival.CNN, 17 Mar. 2022 Gray whales spend winters in the shallow lagoons of Baja California, Mexico, where females nurse their calves and others cavort and mate.Los Angeles Times, 5 Aug. 2021 Fairies dance in the shadow of a New Hampshire forest, and peasant children cavort amid the greenery of Brookline’s Larz Anderson Park.BostonGlobe.com, 19 May 2021 The dream there is to create another Marvel-like universe of characters who could cavort across different platforms. Maureen Dowd, New York Times, 10 Oct. 2020 See More
Word History
Etymology
earlier also cauvaut, cavault, covault, of obscure origin
Note: All early attestations of the word are North American, the first known (as cauvauted) in a letter written by the North Carolina politician John Steele in April, 1794. Various etymologies have been suggested: that the word is altered from curvet entry 1; that it is comprised of the unstressed expressive prefix ca- (as in caboodle) and vault entry 3; that it has some relation with French chahuter "to dance the chahut (a boisterous, somewhat indecent dance), to make an uproar" (see Leo Spitzer, "Cavort," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 48 (1949), pp. 132-37). Apparently the same word is cavaulting "coition" in John Camden Hotten's A Dictionary of Modern, Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (London, 1859). In the second edition of Hotten's dictionary (London, 1860) the word has the etymological note "Lingua Franca,cavolta," though there appears to be no evidence for such a word in Lingua Franca.