Canary

How to spell canary

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce canary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does canary mean?

1. nounA small finch, often bright yellow, kept as a pet for its singing.
2. adjectiveOf a bright, vivid yellow resembling the colour of the bird.

Canary in a sentence

• noun

  The canary in the cage sang every morning.

• adjective

  He painted the kitchen a cheerful canary yellow.

• noun

  Miners once carried a canary underground to detect dangerous gas.

• adjective

  The team wore canary shirts that stood out on the pitch.

Where does canary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Canary Islands off the coast of north-west Africa, whose Latin name was Canariae Insulae, meaning 'the islands of the dogs'. That name in turn came from canis, the Latin word for 'dog', because ancient writers reported large dogs living there. The small green-and-yellow finch was native to those islands, so when Europeans began keeping it as a cage bird in the 1500s they simply called it the canary bird, after its homeland. English took the name in the late 1500s, and over time it shortened to plain canary. The link to canis is a pleasant surprise: a bird famous for its song owes its name, by a long chain, to the Latin for dog.

How the word is built

• canar- (from the Canary Islands, ultimately Latin canis: dog)
• -y (noun suffix)