1A general law, rule, principle, or criterion by which something is judged.

1. 1.1 A Church decree or law.
   a set of ecclesiastical canons

   mass noun legislation which enables the Church of England General Synod to provide by canon for women to be ordained

   Example sentencesExamples

   • Charlemagne encouraged the general adoption of the liturgical books used in Rome, as well as the so-called Dionisyo-Hadriana, the main Roman collection of conciliary canons and papal decrees.
   • The turning point probably came when the General Convention revised the canon on divorce and remarriage.
   • Here, as elsewhere, Coriden notes the tension between the roots of the canons in Roman law and a more recent desire to highlight their connection to the imperatives of the gospel life.
   • They, not the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent, or even the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, were the true legacy of early modern Catholicism for the modern age.
   • Ironically, the monks, who are excluded from politics by both legal laws and religious canons, are probably among the most crucial actors in local elections.

   Synonyms

   law, decree, edict, statute, dictate, dictum, ordinance

   rule, ruling, regulation

   Roman Catholic Church decretal

2A collection or list of sacred books accepted as genuine.

1. 2.1 The works of a particular author or artist that are recognized as genuine.
   the Shakespeare canon

   Example sentencesExamples

   • I have that album as a constant reminder that one can regard an artist's entire canon with disinterest, but love one work with intense fascination.
   • I was rather surprised at the choosing of this opera for a new production, I am sure that there are other operas in the Janácek canon which are more in need of replenishment.
   • No mention is made of the revision, which allowed the story to join the Simple canon, including publication in The Best of Simple.
   • No, not every Morrissey album has been great, but ‘You Are The Quarry’ fits right in to his extremely consistent canon.
   • Over these same three decades he built up his own canon of literary work that has qualified him as one of the most important writers of our era.
   • Given the sheer size of V.S. Naipaul's canon and its general public appeal, it is surprising it took this long to adapt one of his novels to film.
   • He is not the only actor to impersonate a butler in the Wodehouse canon.
   • The same thing simply can't be said about any other two consecutively released studio albums in U2's canon.
   • That may sound like a lot, but when you consider that there are nearly a million words in the whole of the Shakespeare canon, it's not as many as it seems.
   • This one is as neat a demonstration of the Arthurian cycle as any book in the Clarke canon, and as stimulating.
   • As well as illuminating the subtle stylistic differences of these writers, Bergeron perceptively locates correspondences between the civic pageantry and other areas of the authors' canons, particularly the drama.
   • African American culture, heritage, and the need to pay homage to it also provide direction for Thomas's fictional canon, which to date includes six novels.
   • Almost universally excluded from the canon of Woolf's major works, Flush has not been critically evaluated as what it declares itself to be: the biography of a dog.
   • It might be that the easiest way to explain why a movie doesn't work is to compare it to one that does, which is why I bring up the cinematic canon of Christopher Guest and his repertory company.
   • What he does not know about the Shakespeare canon and Shakespeare criticism is perhaps not worth knowing.
   • Can't say I'm sufficiently familiar with Ms Francis's literary canon to comment.
   • He is funny, dignified and minutely knowledgeable about the whole Christie canon, having dramatised all the Poirots and all the Radio 4 Miss Marples with June Whitfield.
   • Further, an author's canon provides an unstable foundation for constructing his or her personal beliefs, as scholarship on Map's works demonstrates.
   • The canon of his prose writings long included De Doctrina Christiana, an unorthodox theological treatise first printed in 1825.
   • These notes display the wide range of the Thurman canon against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance.

   Synonyms

   (list of) works, writings, oeuvre
2. 2.2 The list of works considered to be permanently established as being of the highest quality.
   Hopkins was firmly established in the canon of English poetry

   Example sentencesExamples

   • Moi complained, ‘Showalter's aim, in effect, is to create a separate canon of women's writing, not to abolish all canons.’
   • The English department of Skidmore is pretty hospitable to the idea that those big, fat, male books are not the only important books in the canon.
   • It is possible that Walker, trained in the traditional canon at Sarah Lawrence, may be directly alluding to Shelley's line.
   • Surely, even though it is necessary to question and dismantle canons, it is not an overstatement to claim that classical literature is the cornerstone of Western literature and society.
   • I simply do not believe in the validity of the concept of a canon, and for that reason I consider the important writers of the past not as models, but as challenges.
   • Indeed, a Caribbean female presence has established itself in the literary canons of both Canada and the United States.
   • He also said that Bermuda's education of its young is incomplete without the inclusion of established canons of African literature and other texts in the school curriculum.
   • Do you think many of them are being absorbed into the Western canon, or is the canon being changed to accommodate them?
   • And ultimately, perhaps we may need to be even more careful about ever implying that it is on the basis of an association with the maternal realm that women writers belong in modernist or feminist literary canons.
   • Some professors are also dedicated to the ‘canon’ and cannot figure out how to get that canon taught if not by lecture - the way they learned.
   • So far, the growth of cultural studies has accompanied (though not caused) an expansion of the literary canon.
   • Cultural competence is defined as ‘control of an established canon of literature’.
   • Most of us accept the canon of ‘all-time classics’ by reputation only.
   • That experience for you is going to help you know what it feels like for the average teen reader, or the struggling reader, who reads below grade level, to try to plow through the books in the canon.
   • These phrases serve as bona-fides that the writer's no hack; he or she demonstrates a command of the canon, which lends authority to what's being argued.
   • We now move to issue of reasons for inclusion and/or exclusion from the canon.
   • He is in many ways a unique writer who confounds any simple pigeon-holing or attempts to locate writers in respect to an assumed canon of literature.
   • His legacy to the literary canon is his portrayal of the people, language and customs of the English countryside in his novels.
   • David Lane and Paul Ginsborg provide us with the two latest contributions to the expanding canon, and, although much of their source material is the same, the results are very different.
   • A loose analogy with T. S. Eliot's notion of how a new classic affects the canon of a literature might be drawn here.

3(in the Roman Catholic Church) the part of the Mass containing the words of consecration.

4Music
A piece in which the same melody is begun in different parts successively, so that the imitations overlap.

1A member of the clergy who is on the staff of a cathedral, especially one who is a member of the chapter.

1. 1.1 (in the Roman Catholic Church) a member of certain orders of clergy that live communally according to an ecclesiastical rule in the same way as monks.
   Example sentencesExamples

   • When he returned to his native land, Copernicus was again granted leave from his official duties as a canon in the Ermland Chapter at Frauenburg.
   • The most powerful secular landlords in England founded new communities for canons and built outsized churches for them.
   • The canon's Requiem Mass was held in Waterford, Ireland, where he was born and spent his last years.
   • These circumstances explain the important role of the new religious orders in these areas - the Augustinian canons regular and each of the four main orders of friars in Ireland, for example, and the Cistercians in Wales.
   • As virgin patroness of the canons at Chich, Osith here joins a pantheon of elite women, both in terms of her companion texts and the manuscript's users.
   • He, therefore, has decided to found on his own authority a college of canons there to protect the site.
   • The anonymous author of the Libellus classified monks and canons into three groups based on whether they lived far from men, like the Cistercians, or close to men, like the Victorines, or as hermits.
   • The movement spread across Europe by means of lay associations devoted to education and to prayer, known as Brethren of the Common Life, and a religious order known as the Windesheim canons.
   • At first glance it would seem that religious women were put at a severe disadvantage by this increasing emphasis on votive Masses, a demand that could only be fulfilled by ordained monks and canons.
   • The problem with the Windsor Report's reference to the canons of Nicaea, some conservatives have responded, is that it focuses on the wrong heretics.
   • The canons of Saint-Nizier, though, had the opportunity to portray Aunemund in a very different light.
   • By 1216 there were approximately 700 houses and some 13,000 monks, nuns, canons, and canonesses.
   • The area gets its name because six acres of land here were given to the canons of St Bartholemew's Priory, Smithfield, in 1331.
   • Higden apart, these were all secular clerks rather than monks or canons regular.
   • A monastery (from the Greek ‘to live alone’) is a more or less self-contained settlement constructed to house a community of monks or canons.
   • He became a canon of the Order of St Augustine at the monastery of Holywood in Nithsdale.
   • In 1457, after years of broken promises to return the cloth to the canons of Lirey and later to compensate them for its loss, Margaret was excommunicated.
   • This was an order of some thirty houses, of which the majority were for canons only.
   • They noted that Archbishop Louis de Villars had founded a college of canons at SaintNizier as a new enterprise on his own authority.
   • Many monks and canons, despite their ejection from the cloister, took the oath in order to qualify themselves for the cure of souls and a salary far better than the meagre pension allotted to ex-regulars.