Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.
Mother Nature isn’t playing fair. Last week, temperatures in Houston, Texas, fell so low that both of their major airports shut down flights. Just five miles east, a weather station in Baytown recorded five inches of snow. Lake Charles, Louisiana, which last August saw 18 straight days with a high in the mid- to upper-90s, was issued its first ever blizzard warning. And at the Post offices in central Indiana, we had several days this week in the single digits.
(Meanwhile, in Juneau, Alaska, the temperatures have been holding pretty steady between 35 and 40 degrees.)
Across most of the United States, it’s cold. Unseasonably cold in some places, historically cold in others. And when it gets like this, we like to complain about the weather, so words like freezing and cold are getting a lot of use. Perhaps too much use. There are other, more interesting ways to characterize the low temperatures and to whine about the snow, slush, and ice. Add some of this winter-weather vocabulary to your lexicon to add some pizzazz to your climatological criticisms.
When the temperatures really fall, and you feel your nose hairs freezing as soon as you step outside, you might describe the air as frigid, from the Latin root frigere “to be cold” (and yes, it’s related to refrigerator). But frigid isn’t the only -id word available. You might also say it’s gelid, from the Latin gelu “frost.”
More fun still is algid, which Merriam-Webster notes is the only word in its dictionary that comes from the Latin root algere “to feel cold.” This word also adds darker undertones to low temps: It’s more often used to describe a particularly severe type of malaria that results in cold skin and low blood pressure. (One good thing about a cold winter: no mosquitoes.) Algid is not related to the country of Algeria; that was a name given by the French after they chose Algiers (al-Jazair “the islands” in Arabic) as the capital.
You might describe the air temperature as arctic; capitalized, it refers to the icy regions farthest north, but lowercased it simply means “quite cold.” This word, which I took apart almost six years ago, comes from the Greek word for “bear” arktos. Ancient Greek astronomers identified and named one constellation Arktos Megale “the great bear” — today it’s more well known by its Latin name, Ursa Major. This constellation circles the north star, so navigators could use it to keep track of which direction they were going. Over time, arktos itself became linked to the idea of all things northern.
But other Greeks, perhaps those not too keen on stargazing, found a different vocabulary for the northern climes. The god of the North Wind was called Boreas; an old story proposed that there was a tribe of people who lived in a paradise beyond the North Wind. Hyper is Greek for “beyond,” so these mythological people living farther north than the ancient Greeks would actually venture were hyperborean —literally “beyond the North Wind” — a word that survives today to indicate being from or like the far north.
For something less geological and more technological, try cryogenic. This is a younger word, appearing in print for the first time at the end of the 19th century. It’s a combination of the Latinized form of the Greek kryos “ice cold” and the Latin ending -genic “pertaining to production.” Cryogenic isn’t just about being cold but about creating coldness.
Before cryogenic was coined, the verbose weather prognosticator might have used the word frigorific (“causing cold”) instead, from the Latin frigorificus “cooling.”
Of course, these extreme drops in temperature produce more than just a desire for a blanket. If you look out your front door in the morning, you might see snow, frost, and ice — but there are more interesting ways to call those things out.
You might find it to be a bit rimy outside. Rime, from the Old English hrīm, is another word for “frost” — technically formed from supercooled fog, mist, or clouds. There’s an ancient mariner who’s famous for his rime.
Hoar is from an Old English word meaning “gray, old, venerated.” When the dew on one’s lawn freezes, it’s called hoarfrost, presumably because of its resemblance to an old man’s white beard. We’ll need the temperatures to rise enough to produce dew before we can pull this humdinger out, though.
For most of us, there is no grass, only a white sheet of frozen water. Everything is frore “frozen,” from the past participle of the Old English freosan “to freeze.” Frore has the added fun of sounding like what a shivering lion might say.
Any more of this and we might feel like we’ve been covered by a glacier, or glaciated. Glacier traces back through French to a Latin word meaning “ice,” and it might even come from the same pre-Latin root as gelid. Yes, calling your neighborhood glaciated is hyperbole, but it might still seem fitting as you attempt to scrape an inch of ice from your windshield.
Fortunately, this extreme weather can’t last. Given time, although it will still be cold for many of us, it will at least return to the brumal or hiemal weather we expect. Brumal and hiemal both come from adjective forms of Latin words for “winter” — bruma and hiems. Why does Latin have two words for the same season? For the same reason English has both autumn and fall: It just does.
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