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Canting arms is a technique used in European heraldry
Heraldry

Heraldry is the profession, study, or art of devising, granting, and blazoning Coat of arms and ruling on questions of rank or protocol, as exercised by an officer of arms....
 whereby the name of the individual or community represented in a coat of arms
Coat of arms

A coat of arms, more properly called an armorial achievement, armorial bearings or often just arms for short, in European tradition, is a design belonging to a particular person and used by them in a wide variety of ways....
 is "translated" into a visual pun
Visual pun

A visual pun is a pun involving an or images .Visual puns in which the image is at odds with the inscription are common in Dutch gable stones as well as in cartoons such as Lost Consonants or The Far Side....
 or rebus
Rebus

A rebus is a kind of word play that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words. For example:The term rebus also refers to the use of a pictogram to represent a syllabic sound....
.

The term probably originally came from the same root as the term 'cant' (originally to sing) in the meaning of slang or argot. Other languages call it speaking arms, e.g. in Dutch sprekend wapen.

An example of canting arms are those of the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother
Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon

Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was the Queen Consort of King George VI of the United Kingdom and the British Empire Dominions from 1936 until his death in 1952....
, who was born Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.






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Canting arms is a technique used in European heraldry
Heraldry

Heraldry is the profession, study, or art of devising, granting, and blazoning Coat of arms and ruling on questions of rank or protocol, as exercised by an officer of arms....
 whereby the name of the individual or community represented in a coat of arms
Coat of arms

A coat of arms, more properly called an armorial achievement, armorial bearings or often just arms for short, in European tradition, is a design belonging to a particular person and used by them in a wide variety of ways....
 is "translated" into a visual pun
Visual pun

A visual pun is a pun involving an or images .Visual puns in which the image is at odds with the inscription are common in Dutch gable stones as well as in cartoons such as Lost Consonants or The Far Side....
 or rebus
Rebus

A rebus is a kind of word play that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words. For example:The term rebus also refers to the use of a pictogram to represent a syllabic sound....
.

The term probably originally came from the same root as the term 'cant' (originally to sing) in the meaning of slang or argot. Other languages call it speaking arms, e.g. in Dutch sprekend wapen.

An example of canting arms are those of the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother
Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon

Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was the Queen Consort of King George VI of the United Kingdom and the British Empire Dominions from 1936 until his death in 1952....
, who was born Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Her arms, shown to the right, contain in sinister (i.e. on the wearer's left, viewer's right) the bows and blue lions that make up the arms of the Bowes and Lyon families.

Rebus coat-of-arms

When the visual representation is not straightforward but as complex as a rebus
Rebus

A rebus is a kind of word play that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words. For example:The term rebus also refers to the use of a pictogram to represent a syllabic sound....
, this is sometimes called a rebus coat of arms.

Examples of canting arms

Canting arms – some in the form of rebuses – are quite common in German civic heraldry. They have also been increasingly used in the 20th century among the British royal family.

Sources and references

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