Cannon

How to spell cannon

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cannon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cannon mean?

1. nounA large, heavy piece of artillery that fires shells or balls, especially the mounted guns used historically in warfare.
2. verbTo collide forcefully with someone or something, often after moving at speed.

Cannon in a sentence

• noun

  The museum displays a bronze cannon recovered from a sunken warship.

• verb

  The cyclist swerved and managed not to cannon into the parked van.

• noun

  Each cannon on the old fort was aimed out across the harbour.

• verb

  The toddler began to cannon off the furniture as he ran through the room.

Where does cannon come from?

Language of origin: Italian

This word reaches English from the Italian cannone, which literally meant 'a large tube' or 'big pipe', an augmented form of canna meaning 'reed', 'cane' or 'pipe'. That canna in turn came from the Latin canna, a borrowing from the Greek kanna, meaning a reed or cane, ultimately of Semitic origin. When gunpowder artillery spread across Europe in the late Middle Ages, the long hollow barrel of the weapon was named after the humble tube, and the word entered English through French (canon) around the late 1300s. English later doubled the consonant to give 'cannon', which conveniently keeps the weapon distinct on paper from the single-n 'canon' that means a church law or an accepted body of works. The same canna root also gives us 'cane', 'canal' and 'canyon', all of which preserve the idea of a tube or channel.

How the word is built

• cannon (from Italian cannone: large tube), no productive affixes; the doubled -nn- separates it from the unrelated homophone canon

Words that sound like cannon

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• canon: A recognised, authoritative collection of books, works, or rules accepted as genuine or standard.