the.com/funnel
a shape that turns chaos into a single obedient stream, no negotiation required.
means A cone-shaped tube, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, used to channel liquid or powder into a small opening — or, by extension, anything that gathers many things and directs them to a single point.
from From Latin 'infundibulum,' the funnel itself, built on 'fundere,' to pour — the same restless verb that gives us 'fuse,' 'profuse,' and 'foundry.' It likely reached English through a Romance dialect of southern France (possibly Provençal 'fonilh'), arriving with the wine and oil trades that needed something to pour neatly into a narrow cask. The thing was named for its one job: pouring without spilling.
- tornado kin
- Violent storm vortices are literally named funnel clouds
- marketing hijack
- Sales teams stole the word for customer-herding diagrams
- spider trap
- Funnel-web spiders spin tunnels to ambush prey
- physics cheat
- Wide mouth, narrow throat: gravity does the aiming
- chest tweak
- Pectus excavatum is nicknamed funnel chest
sales funnel at amazon — conversion metric tracking ~3% of site visitors to purchase, optimized by jeff bezos's team since 1995
funnel of tornado — vortex formation in supercell thunderstorms, like the 2011 joplin tornado in missouri with 200+ mph winds
funnel of european eel — glass eels migrating through the sargasso sea funnel system as juveniles returning to freshwater rivers