Other forms: tunnels, tunnelling, tunneling, tunneled, tunnelled
A tunnel is a passage cut through something solid — under a river, through a hill, beneath a city. You go in at one end, the daylight goes out, and you come up somewhere else.
Trains run through tunnels, motorways dive into them, and moles, rabbits and miners dig them. Tunnel is a verb as well: prisoners tunnel out, water tunnels through soft rock, a badger tunnels under a fence. Doctors borrow it for narrow passages in the body — carpal tunnel is the one in your wrist that typing inflames. And two phrases carry the word further than the thing does: light at the end of the tunnel, the first sign that a long bad stretch is nearly finished, and tunnel vision, seeing only what is straight ahead and missing everything at the sides.
1nounmineA passage dug through rock or earth, under the ground or under water.~96%
“The train goes through a tunnel just outside the station.”
2verbdigTo dig a passage of that kind.~2%
“They tunnelled under the wall and got out before morning.”
3nountunnelAn animal's underground passage.~2%
“The rabbits had tunnels running under the whole lawn.”
synonyms: burrow
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 183 sentences found in the wild and placed 154 of them on a sense (29 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Two words could be the parent here and neither has been ruled out: Middle French tonnelle, a net, or tonel, a cask. Both are diminutives of Old French tonne, a cask — a word of uncertain origin itself. So the barrel is in the family whichever way tunnel came, and Old English tunne, the tun, is the relative English kept.
Old French
tonne — cask
Middle French
tonnelle — net
English, today
tunnel
Built from
From Middle French tonnelle (“net”) or tonel (“cask”), diminutive of Old French tonne (“cask”), a word of uncertain origin and affiliation. Related to Old English tunne (“tun; cask; barrel”). More at tun.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA