Canyon

How to spell canyon

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce canyon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does canyon mean?

1. nounA deep, steep-sided valley, typically cut by a river through rock.

Canyon in a sentence

• The hikers descended into the canyon before the midday heat set in.

• A narrow river still runs along the floor of the canyon.

Where does canyon come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

The word came into English in the mid 1800s from American Spanish cañón, which literally meant 'tube' or 'large pipe' and was also used for a deep, hollow gorge cut by a river. That Spanish noun grew out of caña, meaning 'cane', 'reed' or 'hollow tube', which itself traces back to the Latin canna, a reed or pipe (the same root that gives us 'cane' and 'channel'). English speakers exploring the American West borrowed the term for the dramatic river valleys of that landscape, and the original Spanish tilde over the n, written ñ and sounded 'ny', was simply respelled as 'ny' in English. That is exactly the spelling trap: the 'nyon' ending preserves the sound of the Spanish ñ. The most famous example, the Grand Canyon, helped cement the word firmly in English by the late nineteenth century.

How the word is built

• canyon (from Spanish cañón: tube, large pipe, hence a deep gorge)