the.com/ear canal
A skin-lined cul-de-sac that turns air wiggles into gossip you can't unhear.
means The narrow tube running from your outer ear to your eardrum, which channels sound waves inward and produces earwax to protect itself.
from Straightforward compound English: 'ear,' from Old English 'eare,' tracing back to a very old Germanic and Indo-European root for the hearing organ, joined with 'canal,' borrowed via French from Latin 'canalis' meaning pipe or channel (itself related to 'canna,' reed). The anatomical term simply names the thing it describes — no hidden story, just two plain words doing honest, literal work together.
- self-cleaning design
- earwax migrates outward, cotton swabs just push it back
- length
- about 2.5 centimeters, curved like a shy question mark
- acoustic trick
- amplifies frequencies around 3000 Hz, tuned for human speech
- bone plus cartilage
- outer third flexes, inner two-thirds are solid skull