canal

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. An artificial waterway or artificially improved river used for travel, shipping, or irrigation.
2. n. Anatomy A tube, duct, or passageway.
3. n. Astronomy One of the faint, hazy markings resembling straight lines on early telescopic images of the surface of Mars.
4. v. To dig an artificial waterway through: canal an isthmus.
5. v. To provide with an artificial waterway or waterways.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. An artificial waterway for irrigation or navigation. Canals appear to have been first used for conveying water, and were merely shallow ditches with a slight fall. They naturally became, when large enough, a roadway for boats, and eventually for ships. A canal may be a mere cutting to unite bodies of water for the passage of boats, as in some of the chains of lakes in the eastern United States; or a continuous waterway formed by a series of long levels united by locks and carried over rivers and valleys by means of bridges, as the Erie canal; or a canalized river; or a navigable passage connecting lakes or seas, as the Welland canal in Canada, or the Suez canal. Among the longest canals are the Ganges canal in India, about 350 miles long, the Grand Canal in China, about 800 miles, and the Erie canal in New York, 363 miles. The James and Kanawha Rivers Navigation canal, 147 miles long, over-came by its locks a grade of l,916 feet, and the Morris canal in New Jersey, 101 miles long, one of 1,674 feet. The Suez canal (opened in 1869) is 90 miles long, and is level throughout. It is the largest in the world in point of sectional area, and the most important it in a commercial aspect. Canalized rivers are common in western Europe. On ordinary narrow canals boats are usually drawn by horses or mules traveling on a tow-path, though steam-propulsion and steam-towing are now used to some extent; larger ones, called ship-canals, as the Suez, the North Holland, the Welland, etc., are navigated by vessels of different sizes, up to the largest under sail or steam.
2. n. In architecture, a channel; a groove; a flute: thus, the canal of the volute is the channel on the face of the circumvolutions inclosed by a list in the Ionic capital.
3. n. In anatomy, a duet; a channel through which a fluid is conveyed or solids pass; a tubular cavity in a part, or a communication between parts. See duet.
4. n. In zoology, the name of sundry grooves, furrows, apertures, etc., as: the channels of various actinozoans;
5. n. the afferent and efferent pores of sponges;
6. n. the groove observed in different parts of certain univalve shells, and adapted for the protrusion of the long cylindrical siphon or breathing-tube possessed by those animals.
7. n. In botany, an elongated intercellular or intrafascicular space, either empty or containing sap, resin, or other substances.
8. n. Inferior, the inferior dental canal
9. n. Median, the canal in the superior maxillary bone containing the middle superior dental nerve
10. n. Posterior, the canal in the superior maxillary bone containing the posterior superior dental nerve.
11. n. The canalis incisivus on either side.
12. n. The canales incisivi with the anterior palatine canal in sense a.
13. n. The primitive common and continuous cavity of the brain and spinal cord, not infrequently more or less extensively obliterated in the latter, but in the former modified in the form of several ventricles and other cavities.
14. n. Inferior, the channel in the inferior maxillary or lower jaw-bone, which transmits the inferior dental nerves and vessels
15. n. Posterior, one or more fine canals entering the superior maxillary bone about the middle of its posterior surface, and transmitting the posterior dental vessels and nerves.
16. n. One of the canaliculi lacrymales (which see, under canaliculus).
17. n. In echinoderms, a canal of which a part of the wall is formed by the ambulacral nerve and its connections; the track or trace of the ambulacral nerve and its connections.
18. To intersect or cut with canals.
19. n. Same as canaille, 2.
20. n. A long, narrow arm of the sea penetrating far inland: as, Lynn canal, Portland canal, etc.
21. n. The juice-canals or ultimate radicals of the lymph-vessels.
22. n. In sponges, all of the cavities of the body, taken collectively, traversed by the currents of water which nourish the sponge from the time they enter at the pores until they pass out at the osculum.
23. n. A channel which passes through the series of hemal arches beneath the backbone of a fish.
24. n. In sponges, one of the canals which are continuous with the paragastric cavity, as distinguished from an incurrent canal.
25. n. In ctenophorans, a branch of the perradial canal extending into the base of the corresponding tentacle.

Wiktionary

1. n. An artificial waterway, often connecting one body of water with another
2. n. A tubular channel within the body.
3. v. To dig an artificial waterway in or to (a place), especially for drainage
4. v. To travel along a canal by boat

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. An artificial channel filled with water and designed for navigation, or for irrigating land, etc.
2. n. (Anat.) A tube or duct.
3. n. Alaska A long and relatively narrow arm of the sea, approximately uniform in width; -- used chiefly in proper names.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. (astronomy) an indistinct surface feature of Mars once thought to be a system of channels; they are now believed to be an optical illusion
2. n. long and narrow strip of water made for boats or for irrigation
3. n. a bodily passage or tube lined with epithelial cells and conveying a secretion or other substance
4. v. provide (a city) with a canal