whale n. a large man-made snow mound. Editorial Note: Usually resulting from a commercial snow-grooming machinery typical of a ski resort. Etymological Note: So-called because of their large, round shape and perhaps influenced by “whale” meaning “a large or significant example of a particular thing,” as in “I have a whale of a headache.” (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Throwing cheese and shaky cheese are two very different things. In baseball, hard cheese refers to a powerful fastball, and probably comes from a similar-sounding word in Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi. Shaky cheese, on the other hand, is the grated...
I would imagine that the snow color helping the mound look like a great white whale (Moby Dick) has something to do with it too.