Word.ws English Dictionary

canail

canail is the alternative form of canaille.

Meaning of canaille

Noun

canaille (countable and uncountable, plural canailles)

  1. (collective, countable) The lowest class of people; the rabble; the vulgar.
    • I was on a rampart watching the enemy pitch their camp; and, seeing the crowd of idlers round the stream, I asked M. du Pont, commissary of the artillery, to send one cannon-shot among this canaille: he gave me a flat refusal, saying that all this sort of people was not worth the powder would be...1553, Ambroise Paré, “The Journey to Hesdin”, in Journeys In Diverse Places
  2. (Canada, uncountable) Shorts or inferior flour.

Origin of canail

From Italian canaglia, cf. French canaille.

Questions about canail

What is canail the alternative form of?
Canail is the alternative form of canaille.

Words near canail in the dictionary

  1. canafistula
  2. canafistulas
  3. canagliflozin
  4. canagong
  5. canaigre
  6. canail
  7. canaille
  8. canailles
  9. Canaiolo
  10. Canajan
  11. Canajans

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: canail (page history and authors); canaille (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “canail.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/canail. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.