Canvas

How to spell canvas

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce canvas

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does canvas mean?

1. nounA strong, coarse cloth used for sails, tents, bags, and similar heavy-duty items.
2. nounA stretched piece of cloth on which an artist paints, or the finished painting itself.

Canvas in a sentence

• The old tent was made of heavy waterproof canvas.

• The artist stretched a fresh canvas across the wooden frame.

• She stitched a tote bag from a roll of thick canvas.

• His most famous canvas hangs in the city gallery.

Where does canvas come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin cannabis, meaning 'hemp', the tough plant whose fibres were spun into rope and heavy cloth. Roman and later medieval weavers made a strong, coarse fabric from these fibres, and the material took its name from the plant itself. English borrowed it in the 1300s through the Old French canevas, and over time the spelling settled with a single ending 's'. Because painters stretched this durable cloth over frames to paint on, the word came to mean the painting surface as well as the raw fabric. It is worth remembering that the single-s 'canvas' is the cloth, while the double-s 'canvass', meaning to seek votes or opinions, is a separate word that grew from the same source, originally referring to tossing someone in a canvas sheet.

How the word is built

• canvas (from Latin cannabis: hemp), originally a coarse cloth woven from hemp fibre