Welsh Word of the Day: Pant (small valley)

Pant is a Welsh geographical term that refers to a hollow in the ground, or a small valley. It’s a masculine noun. Its plural form is pantiau, and there is a diminutive term pantyn that refers to a particularly small pant. In modern spoken Welsh, we mostly encounter it in place names.

Pant comes from the proto-Celtic word *kwantyos, meaning flat hill or valley. It is unclear where this comes from, but one potential suggestion is the Latin cumulus, meaning hill or heap, which is used in modern English to refer to clouds.

The word is used across Wales, though it may occasionally be substituted with pantle. Lle means place and le is a mutation of lle, so this literally means place where the hollow is. Twll, meaning hole, is another word that might be used to refer to a hollow in the ground, and if referring to a larger valley, you would be more likely to use cwm or dyffryn.

You might recognise the word cwm from the Welsh soap, Pobol y Cwm (People of the Valley), which is about the lives of people in a fictional community in South-West Wales. Did you know it’s the longest running TV soap made by the BBC?

But let’s get back to pant, and see how it mutates.

This means that pant mutates in the common phrase i bant. I bant means to the hollow/valley and has evolved to mean away or off – so to mynd i bant is to go off. Similarly, o bant might be used to mean from away or from far away.

From this phrase, bant has evolved even further to become a term that is used exclusively to mean away, off, or gone. For example, amser bant means time off, a diwrnod bant is an away day, and bant â ni means off we go. It’s pretty much become a word in its own right, although it doesn’t undergo any further mutations, because it’s still technically a mutated form of pant.

You can even troi’r cyfrifiadur bant (turn the computer off), and one of the most common ways to translate the rather rude expression bugger off would be bygro bant. A particularly fun phrase is bant â hi (off she goes), which is used as an adverb to describe something that is being done in a slap-dash, careless or happy-go-lucky way.

It’s important to note that bant is normally only used in this context in the South. Expressions like troi bant or bant â hi wouldn’t be used in the North. You would say i ffwrdd instead of i bant to mean go off or go away.

The regular form pant is less common in everyday speech. It has found its way into some expressions – for example, pant y llaw means the palm of the hand, although you might also hear cledr y llaw. And there is a Welsh idiom, i’r pant y rhed y dŵr, which means literally water runs to the hollow. It refers to the idea of success attracting success.

Pant might also be used to communicate the idea of the English phrase hill and vale, when it’s used to mean everywhere – as in, I searched hill and vale. You could translate this as pant a thalar (hollow and headland) or bryn a phant (hill and hollow). You’ll notice that in the second phrase, pant has undergone an aspirate mutation.

We’ve come across a variety of Welsh landscape words in this article – pant, cwm, dyffryn, thalar, and bryn. Let’s take a look at a few more that are likely to come in handy:

• mynydd = mountain
• llyn = lake
• cae = field
• clogwyn = cliff
• afon = river
• cadwyn = mountain range
• coed = wood
• glyn = vale
• traeth = beach

One place where pant frequently appears in modern Welsh is in place names. This is similar to English, where older words persist in place names—like ton instead of town. In Welsh, a well-known example is llan, which often appears in place names, even though the everyday word for church is eglwys.

It’s the same with pant. From Pant Glas, meaning green hollow, a village in Gwynedd which was the childhood home of opera singer Sir Bryn Terfel, to tiny hamlets in Powys like Pant-y-dŵr, Pant-y-ffridd, and even just Pant, you can find places called pant dotted across Wales.