Meaning

A small, usually yellow, finch (genus Serinus), a songbird native to the Canary Islands..

Definitions by Sense

1. A small, usually yellow, finch (genus Serinus), a songbird native to the Canary Islands.
2. Any of various small birds of different countries, most of which are largely yellow in colour.
3. (informal) A female singer, soprano, a coloratura singer.
4. (slang) An informer or snitch; a squealer.
5. A light, slightly greenish, yellow colour.
6. (slang) A (usually yellow) capsule of the short-acting barbiturate pentobarbital/pentobarbitone (nembutal).
7. (Australia, informal) A yellow sticker applied by the police to a vehicle to indicate it is unroadworthy.
8. Any test subject, especially an inadvertent or unwilling one. (From the mining practice of using canaries to detect dangerous gases.)

Example Sentences

The tendency in these types of situations (as far as I can see) is that because I don't think the act itself is illegal, the police will go through your vehicle systematically loking^([sic]) for anything wrong with it, to slap a canary on it (that's slang for an unroadworthy sticker) or present you with some other fine.

Yes, if the exhaust is to noisey^([sic]) they can slap a yellow canary on it, but the[n] who cares you got rid of it.

You don't have to carry a spare wheel for a car to be roadworthy, and if you *do* carry one, it doesn't have to be in a roadworthy condition *unless* you fit it [to] the car and drive on it. / If it's not and you get pinched, expect a canary...

Ile to my honeſt knight ſir Iohn Falſtaffe, / And drinke Canary with him.

And though the annals of the period do not show us that there was less ale drawn, or less canary called for; men got dry with the heat of polemical discussion, and drunk with a text, not the fag end of a ballad, in their mouths; and people made a sort of morality of straight hair, long faces, and sad-coloured garments.

Or maybe you'd accept iv a couple o' bottles of claret or canaries?

In an other corner, Mistris Minx, a marchants wife, that will eate no cherries, forsooth, but when they are at twentie shillings a pound, that lookes as simperingly as if she were besmeard, and iets it as gingerly as if she were dancing the canaries, […]

[…] I haue ſeen a medicine / That's able to breath life into a ſtone, / Quicken a rocke, and make you dance Canari / With ſprightly fire and motion, […]

Word Forms

• canaries
• more canary
• most canary
• canarying
• canaried

Synonyms for canary

Related Words

When Should You Use Canary?

Use canary when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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