canal

Pluralcanals

Formscanals, canalling, canalled

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A man-made waterway, or a river improved by digging, used for travel, shipping, or irrigation.

   Barges still move freight along the canal between the two ports.

   Engineers widened the old canal so larger vessels could pass through.

   Similarwaterway, channel, cut

   Note

   The waterway sense carries a reed inside it. Latin canālis, "channel," comes from canna, "reed, cane," a word that passed through Greek from Akkadian and Sumerian before English borrowed canal from French. Channel is its doublet: the same Latin word, arriving by a different route. Canal is the one English uses for water that people have dug or improved, such as a barge route or an irrigation cut.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A tube-like channel running through the body or through a plant.

   Nerves pass through a bony canal at the base of the skull.

   Resin flows through specialized canals in the pine's wood.

   Similarduct, channel, passage, tube

   Note

   Anatomists and botanists use the word for an enclosed passage that carries something through tissue: sound through the ear's auditory canal, resin through the canals of conifers, nerves through bone. Karen McGee, writing in 2022 about early monotremes, describes a huge canal through a fossil jaw that is thought to have carried the nerves for electroception. The reed behind the waterway sense fits this meaning especially well, since a reed is a hollow tube.

3. 3
   verbtransitive

   To dig an artificial waterway through or to a place, especially in order to drain it.

   The estate owner decided to canal the wetlands for better drainage.

   Engineers canaled the swampy basin before construction could begin.

   Similardrain, ditch, channel

   Note

   The verb doubles its final consonant in one spelling tradition and not in the other: canalled and canalling sit beside the single-l canaled that Louisiana State University's Proceedings use in 1968. Its natural setting is wetland management, where a salt marsh may be canaled or impounded, two ways of handling water in land too wet to use. Pick one spelling and keep it consistent.

4. 4
   verbintransitive

   To make one's way by boat along a canal.

   Each summer they canal across the region in a narrowboat.

   The couple canaled along the old waterway for two weeks.

   Similarcruise, boat, sail

   Note

   A traveler's verb that names a journey by its route, much as motored names one by its means. William Yoast Morgan's A Journey of a Jayhawker (1905) has "Near Rotterdam we canalled by Delfthaven." It takes no object. Instead it is followed by a preposition such as along, by or through. Its spelling follows the same pattern as the drainage verb.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   One of the faint, hazy markings resembling straight lines seen on early telescopic images of the surface of Mars.

   Lowell sketched a fine canal running between two dark patches on the Martian disk.

   Later photographs failed to confirm the canals earlier observers had drawn.

   Note

   An astronomer's term with a cautionary history. Observers in the late nineteenth century drew faint, line-like markings on their telescopic views of Mars. These were later shown to be optical artifacts, not channels carrying water. The word usually appears in the plural, as in Martian canals. Today it names a famous misreading of the planet, not any real feature of its surface.

Showing meanings only. Show all 5