snowroller
n.— Note: Also as two words: “snow roller.” «Several days ago, several hundred rather large snowballs appeared on Lake Eyak over night. The next day I received phone calls and e-mails from curious Cordovans asking what they were and how they got there. One person thought maybe some high school kids were in the process of making lots of snowmen but never got the snowballs stacked on top of each other. If you got a chance to see this strange phenomenon, you probably noticed they were very similar in size and shape and fairly well dispersed across the northeastern part of the lake. They are called “snowrollers,” and they occur under very specific weather conditions like the ones that occurred overnight.» —“Solving a snow mystery” by Allen Marquette Cordova Times (Alaska) Mar. 20, 2009. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
In 1971, when a new public library opened in Troy, Michigan, famous authors and artists were invited to write letters to the city’s youngest readers, extolling the many benefits of libraries. One of the loveliest was from E.B. White, author of...
After our conversation about the expression dingle day, a term used by workers at a research station in Antarctica to denote bright, sunny weather, a listener offers a possible explanation for this term. It may derive from the idea of the skies...