desert cooler
n.— Note: Wikipedia has a decent entry for this type of air conditioner. Collins is the only mainstream dictionary publisher to include the term, but does so with an outdated definition: “a cooling device in which air is driven by an electric fan through wet grass.” «The South Korean white goods manufacturer is eying the lower-middle class consumer who largely continues to use water-based coolers, also known as desert coolers, to beat the summer heat.» —“It’s cool! LG plans ACs as cheap as coolers” in Seoul, South Korea LivePunjam June 4, 2009. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
If you alternate alcoholic beverages with glasses of water over the course of an evening, you’re said to be zebra striping. This bit of slang was inspired by how the animal’s alternating black-and-white markings are like the contrast between the...
Why do we write the sound of a dog barking as bow wow? Isn’t that noise more like woof, woof or arf, arf or ruff ruff? Surprisingly, the oldest of these is bow wow, or as William Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest (Bookshop|Amazon), bowgh wawgh...