I keep seeing things about “that was/wasn’t canon”, “…head canon…” and everything else of the like and I for the life of me can’t figure out what it means other than that it was something that was supposed to happen. And like how would you use it in a sentence?
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Also, canon is short for canonical which you will see used more outside of entertainment especially in academia and religion.
“Canon” refers to the official or accepted storyline, events, and characters in a fictional universe. Think of it like the “real” version of a story, the one the creators or official sources say actually happened within that fictional world.
For example, in Star Wars, the movies are considered canon because they show what actually happens in the story according to the creators. If someone writes a fanfiction about Luke Skywalker, that story isn’t canon because it’s not part of the official storyline.
There are also terms like “headcanon”, which means someone’s personal belief about a story that isn’t officially confirmed but fits into the universe in their mind. For instance, someone might think a character in a show secretly loves another character, even if the show never confirms it. That’s headcanon—your own version of events that make sense to you.
You might use it like this:
“That scene in the latest movie was canon, so it really happened in the storyline.”
“I think Hermione from Harry Potter became a teacher later, but that’s just my headcanon.”
Non-canon refers to things that don’t officially fit into the real storyline. For example, spin-off novels or fan-made content that aren’t recognized by the original creators are considered non-canon.
In short:
Canon: Official events that are part of the real story.
Headcanon: Personal ideas or interpretations about a story that aren’t officially confirmed.
Non-canon: Anything that’s not part of the official story.
In medieval times, a “canon” meant a rule or decree, especially a religious one (it still can mean this in some contexts). There are longstanding disputes about which texts should be included in the Bible, and people started referring to the ones that were officially included according to some authority as “canon” or “canonical”. This then got extended to other kinds of texts; for example, “the literary canon” means the set of famous works of literature that anyone who is into literature should be familiar with. In the 1930s, people started talking about “the Sherlock Holmes canon”, meaning the stories about Sherlock Holmes written by Arthur Conan Doyle as opposed to later stories written by other authors. It eventually became commonplace to use the same language to refer to any connected series of fictional works, and to specific ideas in those works as opposed to works themselves. For example, someone might claim that a specific Star Trek spin-off novel “is canon”, but they might also say that a specific statement made in that novel about a particular alien species “is canon”. Sometimes there are disputes about what should be considered “canon” because even the “official” works in a series contradict each other or because the series has a messy publication history (e.g. the authors have specifically disowned certain works or it’s not clear who wrote all of them). “Headcanon” is mostly only used on social media. People use it to refer playfully to their own interpretations of a work. For example, “my headcanon is that Romeo and Juliet magically came back to life and lived happily ever after”.
Canon is an old Greek word that originally means rule (as in, a rule of a game or ruling as in a judge does). It came to Latin and from there to English.
In the development of the language, canon got a very specific meaning. Historically there was one very important ruling when priests decided to put together the Bible. Up until that point there was no official Christian Bible, only a bunch of texts. This event, this ruling was called canonization of the Bible, and the official version of Bible was the canonical (“ruled”) version as opposed to unofficial versions that vere present in those times.
So when the word finally came to English, it brought the meaning of rule as in “a set of rules agreed upon”, but it’s more often used as a “set of books or stories or other things being official” as opposed to unofficial or exceptional. For example in biology there are 20 normal amino acids and there are some weird ones called non-canonical.
In pop culture canonical or canon often refers to the story or lore from the official author (like Harry Potter stories coming from Rowling) as opposed to stories written by fans (so called fanfic). It’s possible for example that a fanfic is written with a character but the author kills that character before the timeline of the fanfic so the fanfic can’t fit the canon. Or a fan writes a different ending that contradicts the canon.
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