Canonical
/kəˈnɑnɪkəl/adjective
Conforming to an accepted standard form, or belonging to an authoritative list.
The Greek roots
Literally: “belonging to the measuring rod”
The story of the word
A κανών was a carpenter's straightedge before it was ever a law. Polyclitus called both his treatise on ideal proportion and the statue that demonstrated it the Kanon, a physical standard you could measure against. Church councils used the word for the fixed list of scripture and for their own decrees, and mathematicians took it for the one preferred form a matrix or an equation can be reduced to. A cannon is not related; that comes from Italian for a tube.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Reduce the quadratic to canonical form before comparing the two curves.
That proof is the canonical one; every textbook copies it.