Canon (fandom)
Etymology
Borrowed from the religious and literary sense of canon (Greek kanōn, “measuring rod, rule”) — the authoritative body of texts. Early-20th-century Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts applied “the Canon” to Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories, and later fan communities generalized it to mean whatever a franchise’s official works establish.
noun · /KAN-uhn/
What officially counts as part of a story’s established continuity — the events and facts a franchise treats as really having happened.
What it names
It names the authoritative version of a fictional world, against which everything else — spin-offs, fan theories, contradictions — gets measured. Fandoms argue endlessly over what is “canon” precisely because it settles what is allowed to be true.
Example
The tie-in novels are fun, but none of it is canon until the films confirm it.
Related idea
Contrast headcanon, a single fan’s private interpretation: canon is official and shared, a headcanon is unofficial and personal.
noun · /KAN-uhn/
The authoritative body of works a culture treats as definitive — scripture’s fixed set of books, or the “great works” a field is measured against, as in the literary canon.
What it names
It names what officially counts as central and legitimate within a tradition, and so what gets taught, cited, and preserved — which is why fights over “opening the canon” are really fights over whose work is allowed to matter.
Example
Each generation reopens the argument over which novels belong in the canon.
Related idea
The fandom sense is a direct borrowing of this one: a franchise’s “canon” is its scripture, the works it treats as authoritative.