The word cloud comes from Old English clūd, meaning “rock” or “hill,” making it a relative of the word clod. The sense of a “hill” or “mass of rocks” was later applied to those vaporous hills in the sky. This is part of a complete episode...
In 1803, a shy British pharmacist wrote a pamphlet that made him a reluctant celebrity. The reason? He proposed a revolutionary new system for classifying clouds — with Latin names we still use today, like cumulus, cirrus, and stratus. Also: when...
Jacob in Frankfort, Kentucky, remembers that on foggy mornings in Appalachia, he’d hear grownups say that the groundhogs are making coffee. Writer Jesse Stuart, who served as Kentucky’s Poet Laureate in the mid-1950s, wrote evocatively...
Claggy, a regional UK weather word, originally meant a thick, low-level cloud, damp, overcast, foggy, or misty. Because it comes from an old word having to do with sticky things, it also came to describe air that feels unpleasantly close and humid...
The threat I’m going to cloud up and rain all over you goes back to at least 1911. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Ima Cloud Up and Rain” We heard from Keith Johnston in Rosemead, California, and he writes, A...
Luke Howard’s Essay on the Modifications of Clouds gave English writers and artists a new Latin vocabulary for classifying clouds, and its influence reached John Constable and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s poem The Cloud turns a cloud into an “I”...