canal
noun · verb
Simple meaning
An artificial waterway or artificially improved river used for travel, shipping.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
kuhnalSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
kəˈnæl
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
An artificial waterway or artificially improved river used for travel, shipping, or irrigation.
verb
To dig an artificial waterway in or to (a place), especially for drainage
Provide (a city) with a canal
To travel along a canal by boat
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B1 · Intermediate (estimated)
- Frequency
- Common
- Typical Use
- Everyday English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: An artificial waterway or artificially improved river used for travel, shipping, or irrigation.
Used this way, canal is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use canal
- “We took a boat ride along the old canal through the city.”
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
A zone consisting of a strip of land across the Isthmus of Panama that contains the Panama Canal.
A long boat that carries freight and is narrow enough to be used in canals.
A circular canal in the eye that drains aqueous humor from the anterior chamber of the eye into the anterior ciliary veins.
A canal in northern Scotland that links North Sea with the Atlantic Ocean.
A canal that connects Lake Okeechobee with the Caloosahatchee River in southern Florida to form part of the Cross-Florida Waterway.
A canal connecting Cape Cod Bay with Buzzards Bay.
Related words
Connected by subject or meaning, not by word formation.
A spindle-shaped canal extending from the uterus to the vagina.
The canal in successive vertebrae through which the spinal cord passes.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.