Other forms: canals
A canal is a waterway cut by people for boats or drainage. A canal boat, the Panama Canal, walk along the canal.
It has no current, which is why a horse could once pull a barge carrying fifty times what it could pull on a road — that arithmetic built the canal network and the industrial revolution with it. Locks lift boats between levels. In the body, a canal is a passage: the ear canal. Note that the Latin means a reed pipe.
1nouncanalA waterway cut by people for boats or drainage.
“We hired a narrow boat and spent a week travelling along the canal.”
2nounpassageA passage in the body.
“The doctor looked into my ear canal with a small torch.”
canal is a channel.
Latin canalis means a channel, from canna, a reed. Cannon, cane and channel come from the same reed.
akk
𒄀 — reed
Ancient Greek
κάννα — reed
Latin
canālis — channel, canal, narrow passage
Old French
canal
Middle French
canal
English, today
canal
Built from
Borrowed from Middle French canal, from Old French canal, from Latin canālis (“channel, canal, narrow passage”), from canna (“reed, cane”), from Ancient Greek κάννα (“reed”), from akk 𒄀 (“reed”). a doublet of channel. See also cane and -al.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA