canary
Pluralcanaries
Verbcanaries, canarying, canaried
Pluralcanaries
Formscanaries, canarying, canaried
- 1A small finch of the genus Serinus, native to the Canary Islands, that is usually yellow and known for its song.
The canary in the hallway cage trilled whenever someone ran the faucet.
Breeders bring their best canaries to the regional bird show every spring.
Note
The bird is named for its islands, and the islands were named for dogs: in Latin the largest was Insula Canaria, "Dog Island", from canis, "dog". The name came into English through Spanish canario and French canarie. The same place name stands behind the island wine, which is why a songbird and a sweet white wine share one word.
- 2Anyone or anything used as a test subject, especially without knowing it or against its will.
Early buyers of the car ended up as unwitting canaries for its faulty brakes.
The first class to use the untested curriculum served as a canary, though no one had asked the parents.
Note
Mining supplied the picture: canaries were carried underground to detect dangerous gases, and the songbird met the danger before the miners did. The figurative canary is likewise whoever meets a risk or an experiment first, and the word usually carries a complaint, because someone else decided they should go first.
- 3A person who informs on others by giving away their secrets.
The detectives had a canary inside the crew who fed them every detail of the job.
Prison is a dangerous place for canaries once word gets around.
Similarinformer, snitch, rat, informant
Note
Calling someone a canary is an insult as well as slang: it accuses them of betraying the people around them. The word keeps company with snitch and squealer and suits crime stories and tough talk; in a news report or a courtroom the neutral word is informant. It has a verb to match, to snitch on someone.
- 4A light yellow color with a slight greenish tinge.
The designer paired canary with navy for the spring collection.
The old farmhouse was painted a pale canary with white trim.
- 5Light yellow in color.
He showed up in a canary sweater that no one could miss.
A canary convertible was parked outside the diner.
- 6To inform on others by betraying their secrets, especially about illegal activities.
Facing twenty years, the driver decided to canary and gave up the names of everyone involved.
Someone in the warehouse had been canarying to the inspectors for months.
Similarinform, snitch, squeal, rat
Note
Here the informer becomes the act itself, in the same slang. Its forms follow carry: someone canaries, has canaried, or has been canarying for months, with the y kept before -ing and turned to ie before -s and -ed.
- 7Any of various small birds found in different countries, most of them largely yellow.
Every summer, wild canaries strip the thistle seeds along the fence line.
The guide pointed out two kinds of canary on the savanna, neither of them the familiar cage bird.
- 8A change that is tested by releasing it first to a subset of machines or users before rolling it out to all of them.
The new search feature went out as a canary to one data center before the global launch.
Error rates on the canary doubled within an hour, so engineers rolled it back.
Note
Release engineers borrowed the idea of the unwitting test subject: a small slice of real machines or traffic takes the change first, and its error rates and performance are watched against the rest of the system. A healthy canary means the rollout widens; a sick one is rolled back before most users ever meet the fault.
- 9In software, to release a change first to a small group of machines or users, checking it before rolling it out to everyone.
Always canary configuration changes before pushing them to every region.
After canarying the update to two percent of users, the team saw no new errors.
Note
Engineers use it transitively, with the change as its object and the audience after to: you canary a configuration change, or canary a build to one region before the rest of the fleet. It is the working verb behind the trial release and belongs to software shop talk, not to general vocabulary.
- 10A value placed in memory so that a buffer overflow will corrupt it first, letting the program detect the overflow and recover.
The compiler inserts a random canary between the local buffers and the return address on the stack.
Because the canary had been overwritten, the server caught the overflow and shut the request down before any damage was done.
Note
The trap works because of where it sits and when it is read: an overflow running from a function's local buffers toward its saved return address must overwrite it first, and the value is checked just before the function returns. Picking it at random means an attacker cannot simply write the expected value back.
- 11
- 12A white wine from the Canary Islands, light in body and sweet in taste.
He ordered a bottle of canary and two glasses, and the talk went on until midnight.
The merchant's cellar held claret, port and a dozen casks of canary.
Note
The wine shares its name with the islands it came from, and it flows through older English writing. In Shakespeare a character heads off to drink canary with Sir John Falstaff; Letitia Elizabeth Landon has it called for alongside ale, and Le Fanu writes it in the plural, offering a couple of bottles of claret or canaries.
- 13A capsule, usually yellow, of the short-acting barbiturate pentobarbital (Nembutal).
The dealer was arrested with two hundred canaries in a shoebox.
A single canary was found on the floor beside the bed.
Note
The name comes from the color: the capsules were usually yellow, like the bird. It is street slang, not a word a doctor or pharmacist would use; in medical talk the drug is pentobarbital, also called pentobarbitone, or by its brand name, Nembutal.
- 14A yellow sticker that police attach to a vehicle to show that it is unroadworthy.
Ride around with an exhaust that loud and they'll slap a canary on your bike.
Half the cars at the roadside check ended up with canaries on their windscreens.
Note
Australian drivers know it best with its verb: police slap a canary on a car or a motorbike, for a noisy exhaust or anything else that makes it unroadworthy. The name is simply the sticker's color, and speakers sometimes say a yellow canary as if to make sure. It is informal Australian English, the talk of drivers rather than official wording.
- 15A quick, spirited dance whose origins are uncertain but may be Spanish.
The early-music group closed the concert with a canary, and its quick leaping steps drew loud applause.
Dancing masters taught the canary to young courtiers along with slower, statelier dances.
Note
Writers of Shakespeare's day used the dance as a picture of sprightly movement. Thomas Nashe already has it in 1592, and in All's Well That Ends Well a medicine is strong enough to "make you dance Canari / With sprightly fire and motion". The plural, canaries, names the same dance, and the dance lent English a verb for dancing nimbly.
- 16To dance nimbly, in the manner of the canary dance.
but to jig off a tune at / the tongue's end, canary to it with your feet,
c. 1595, William Shakespeare, “Loues Labour’s Lost”Note
The verb borrows the dance whole and behaves like dance itself: you canary to a tune, and the feet do the work. In Love's Labour's Lost it sits beside jig, in the advice to jig off a tune at the tongue's end and canary to it with your feet: sing it, then dance it.
- 17A ticket already issued once, kept by a ticket seller, conductor, or driver and resold to a later passenger to defraud the transport company.
The audit found that the conductor had been selling canaries on the late train and pocketing the fares.
When the inspector checked her ticket, he realized it was a canary, issued to another rider earlier that morning.
Note
Selling canaries is the usual phrase, and it names the whole scheme: a driver or conductor keeps a ticket that has already been issued, hands it to the next passenger and pockets the fare. No forgery is involved. The ticket is genuine; the transport company is simply paid once for two rides.
- 18A sovereign, the British coin.
The bookmaker counted out five canaries and pushed them across the table.
A canary in his pocket was more than the stable boy earned in a month.
Note
British slang once called the sovereign a canary, but the usage is obsolete and fits only writing set in the past. Even there it needs help from its surroundings, such as a purse, a price or a payment, because a modern reader will picture the bird long before the coin.
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Origin
From French canarie, from Spanish canario, from Latin Canariae insulae ("Canary Islands"). The largest island, Insula Canaria ("Dog Island"), was named for its dogs, from canārius ("canine"), from canis ("dog").