"a continued discharge of artillery," 1650s, from cannon + -ade. As a verb, "attack with artillery," from 1660s. Compare French canonnade (16c.), Italian cannonata. Related: Cannonaded; cannonading.
Entries linking to cannonade
cannon n.
c. 1400, "artillery piece, mounted gun for throwing projectiles by force of gunpowder," from Anglo-French canon (mid-14c.), Old French canon (14c.), from Italian cannone "large tube, barrel," augmentative of Latin canna "reed, tube" (see cane (n.)). The double -n- spelling to differentiate it from canon is from c. 1800. Cannon fodder (1847) translates German kanonenfutter (compare Shakespeare's food for powder in "I Hen. IV").
-ade
word-forming element denoting an action or product of an action, via French, Spanish, or Italian, ultimately from Latin -ata, fem. past-participle ending used in forming nouns. The usual form in French is -ée. The parallel form, -ade, came into French about the 13c. via southern Romanic languages (Spanish, Portuguese, and Provençal -ada, Italian -ata), hence grenade, crusade, ballad, arcade, comrade, balustrade, lemonade, etc.
This foreign suffix ade has been so largely imported, and at a time when the French language had still a certain plastic force, that it has been adopted as a popular suffix, and is still employed to form a crowd of new words, such as promenade, embrassade, glissade, bourrade, &c. [Brachet, "Etymological Dictionary of the French Language," Kitchin transl., Oxford, 1882]
Latin -atus, past-participle suffix of verbs of the 1st conjugation, also became -ade in French (Spanish -ado, Italian -ato) and came to be used as a suffix denoting persons or groups participating in an action (such as brigade, desperado).