1According to or ordered by canon law.

2Included in the list of sacred books officially accepted as genuine.

1. 2.1 Accepted as being accurate and authoritative.
   the canonical method of comparative linguistics

   Example sentencesExamples

   • In our present work, we use the Replica Exchange Monte Carlo method to obtain the canonical distribution of both monomer and dimer forms separately.
   • To foster learning, they contend, organizations must see beyond conventional, canonical job descriptions and recognize how learning occurs in the rich context of practice.
   • First, if you ever want to clean your MBR from whatever is installed there, the canonical method is to use the fdisk program from an MS-DOS boot floppy.
   • The feature was so useful that it became a canonical component of the standard weblog entry.
   • Seven hundred years later, two things remain constant: first, the primacy of Francis' life, and second, the futility of trying to produce a canonical version of that life.
   • Much of the controversy that Life is Beautiful attracted centres on its lack of authenticity in its departure from the accepted or canonical representation of the Holocaust, which is based on historical truth, realism and tragedy.
   • According to the canonical recipe, a stew (zirwak, from the medieval Persian zirbag: ‘that which is cooked underneath’) is cooked in the cauldron-like pot qazan.
   • Freedom in its fullest sense, then, is only possible in a canonical form of social order, in which all take part in shaping the conditions of common life.
   • How about Alfred Wegener and continental drift, probably the canonical story of establishment myopia?

   Synonyms

   recognized, authoritative, authorized, accepted, sanctioned, approved, received, established, orthodox

   standard, normal, usual, ordinary, stock, customary, regular, traditional
2. 2.2 (of a writer or work) belonging to the literary canon.
   canonical writers like Jane Austen

   Example sentencesExamples

   • His is not a book about poetry, and yet a canonical poet is consulted for the distinction that structures the book.
   • These works have cast a long shadow, and their influence has helped to broaden approaches to a range of canonical writers.
   • The war in Testament of Youth, then, is clearly a different kind of war from that which appears in texts by canonical male writers examined by critics like Fussell.
   • The writings of Ern Malley, in spite of the intentions of the authors, have reached canonical literary status with their inclusion in their entirety in the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry.
   • It has some bearing on the meaning of one of the great historical novels that remains canonical in the most obdurate of ways, Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi.
   • Breadth of reading also played a central role in science, because to establish their authority as writers many scientists needed to show a familiarity with the canonical texts of the Western literary tradition.
   • The last chapter offers an analysis of a single canonical work of art of the thirteenth century BCE, the altar of Tukulti Ninurta I found at Assur.
   • In this groundbreaking study of canonical white writers, Morrison persuasively argues that a powerful black presence inhabits much of what we currently consider American literature.
   • Although these are canonical works, Eco's approach to them is that of a revisionist literary historian.
   • Once banned, often excoriated, still dauntingly difficult, Ulysses has become the canonical twentieth-century novel.
   • He did sometimes express amazement that some of the great canonical books (The Faerie Queene comes to mind) were taken seriously; this was part of his conversational charm.
   • Each panelist offered 10 canonical or recommended books for students, which I've posted on this page, along with my own list.
   • My exegetical method combines elements of postmodernist literary criticism and canonical criticism.
   • She pursues her task ambitiously, tirelessly, and scrupulously through the major texts of three canonical writers of early modern English literature.
   • Arthur Miller's drama has so long been accorded canonical status that it can easily be taken for granted.
   • Virginia Woolf has become a canonical author, but Firbank, Compton-Burnett, and Pater remain relatively marginal figures.
   • And while perhaps China's most canonical poet, Li Bai, made this the recurring motif of his poetry, he didn't spend a lot of his adult life at home.
   • The reverence accorded canonical figures, the faith that art was immortal, the fascination with an individual artist's character - he ridiculed them all.
   • In the Indian literary pantheon, Ghosh and Naipaul have become canonical.
   • Traditionally historians and critics of Caribbean art have been preoccupied with identifying and categorizing Caribbean artists according to received canonical ideas of art and art history.
3. 2.3 According to recognized rules or scientific laws.
   canonical nucleotide sequences

   Example sentencesExamples

   • For most elements with poly tails in the genomic sequence, the canonical AATAAA polyadenylation signal can be found upstream.
   • Polymorphic residues are shaded, and their side chains in the canonical sequence are also shown.
   • Both sides of the T-DNA insert were intact, with canonical left-border sequences facing outward (data not shown).
   • Translation of the DNA is performed initially according to the canonical code, but when the code changes different organisms in the population may be translated by different codes.
   • We used the RT of the element present in sequence AC006067 as the canonical copy for the analyses presented in figure 3.
   • The simulation method is the canonical MC method.
   • Ironically, the need for remarkable flexibility may actually help to explain strong conservation of the canonical CTD sequence.
   • Indeed, it is possible to recognize as canonical sentences those that conform in their structure to the normal clause patterns, such as subject-verb-direct object.
   • Another possibility is cross-binding of Swi4 and Mpb1 to canonical sequences for the other factor.
   • An alternative explanation for the low level of divergence among canonical P sequences in the two species groups is that these elements shared a common ancestor more recently than did their host species.
   • The best results were obtained by the local alignment method LALIGN, as the analyzed sequences contained numerous gaps, insertions, and duplications relative to the canonical hobo sequence.
   • This region of RPB1 in animals, plants, and fungi, as well as a number of protists is composed of heptad repeats with a canonical sequence of YSPTSPS.
   • High-priority inserts were then sequenced from both ends; virtually all of them had a Cbs element with the canonical chromosome breakage sequence.
   • These mutations generated variant repeats that differed at one or several positions from the canonical sequences defined earlier for each repeat of the A 2 allele.
   • It is likely that these two proteins represent only the first of many, however, since a proteomics study recently identified other nucleus-encoded chloroplast proteins that appear to lack canonical TP sequences.
   • To date, the canonical model for biological sequence evolution with indels has been the TKF91 model.
   • These oligomers are not expected to form dimeric duplexes and contain no canonical GpC sequences.
   • Note that the D. tripunctata group is found in a phylogenetic branch that is rather distant from the other groups with canonical P sequences.
   • In addition, within a given tract, variations on the canonical repeat sequence can occur.
   • Several canonical and noncanonical nucleotide sequences, called E-boxes, lie within this region and show a wide range of DNA-binding affinities for the Sc-Da complexes.
4. 2.4Mathematics Relating to a general rule or standard formula.
   Example sentencesExamples

   • We used a complex-sounding but conceptually simple statistical method known as canonical discriminant analysis to test whether zircon chemistry could be used to reliably determine the host deposit type.
   • For the most part these chapters do computations with specific examples, establishing canonical forms and other structure theorems for certain classes of groups.
   • This standardization makes the canonical coefficients comparable to each other, but does not influence other aspects of the analysis.
   • The standardized canonical discriminant function coefficients show the relative association between the discriminating variables and the discriminant functions.
   • Todd generalised the arithmetic genus and the invariants of the canonical system on an algebraic variety to a system of invariants of every codimension.

3Relating to a cathedral chapter or a member of it.

The prescribed official dress of the clergy.