Canto

• A canto is a significant section of a long poem or the highest part in a piece of choral music. It is sometimes used as a synonym for a hymn or canticle.

• Musically, it is usually the melody. Because canto means 'song' in many Romance languages it is also a modified element of the names of several musical forms including:
• Canto Nuevo, a Latin American folk music.
• Bel canto, an operatic singing style.

• Poetically, it is derived from its Italian meaning as a division of an epic or long narrative poem, such as Dante's The Divine Comedy. The first English poem to use cantos is The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. The form was brought to popular attention by Byron in Don Juan and is the basis of Ezra Pound's eponymous The Cantos. Other notable uses of poetic cantos include Canto General by Pablo Neruda

• Canto is the surname of the Mexican boxer Miguel Canto.

• Canto is sometimes a colloquial abbreviation for the Cantonese language. For example: the term Cantopop for Cantonese pop music.