Over the last few days we have watched the destruction in the US after Hurricane Milton made landfall on Thursday (AEDT) before tracking across the state.
When fierce storms wreak havoc, we hear them described as hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons or tornadoes. These words are used for different types of storms in different places and even as the wrath from different gods.
Hurricane—chaos and disorder
A hurricane is a type of tropical cyclone that forms over the North Atlantic, the northeastern Pacific, and the South Pacific oceans. Hurricanes are enormous storms, featuring intense winds, heavy rains, and spiral around a central eye.
“Hurricane” comes from the Spanish word “huracan” which originates with the indigenous cultures of the Caribbean. It started as furacan from a Taino (native West Indian) word. In Portuguese, it became furacão. In Spanish the -f- became -h-. It is first used in English in Richard Eden’s translation of “Decades of the New World” (1555):
“These tempestes of the ayer (which the Grecians caule Tiphones …) they caule furacanes”
Guabancex is the West Indian god of chaos and disorder (in the Taíno and Arawak cultures of the Caribbean). She was described as a mercurial goddess that controlled the weather, conjuring the destructive storms we know as hurricanes.
Typhoon—father of the winds
A typhoon is another violent storm, cyclone, or hurricane of India or the China Seas. The word is also from the 1550s and comes from Greek typhōn for “whirlwind” which is personified as a giant serpentlike god known as the father of the winds. The word, in reference to titanic storms in the East Indies (India and South East Asia) is found first in Portuguese in the mid-16th century. It is also suggested to come from tufan, a word in Arabic, Persian, and Hindi meaning “big cyclonic storm.”
Cyclone—a circle in the sky
Cyclone is a more general and scientific term used by meteorologists to refer to any large-scale system of winds that rotates inward to an area of low pressure.
The word cyclone originates from the Greek word kyklos, meaning “circle” or “wheel.” It refers to extensive storms characterised by the revolution of air around a calm centre in which the wind blows spirally around the centre (counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere as viewed from above). It was coined by British East India official, Henry Piddington in about 1833 to describe massive storms at sea.
Tornado—the twisting funnel
Tornado also emerged in the 1550s. A ternado was a navigator’s word for a small, violent, windy thunderstorm in the tropical Atlantic. It is probably a borrowing from Spanish tronada “thunderstorm,” from Latin tonare “to thunder”. Thunder in English is derived from the Nordic war god, Thor.
Tornadoes are different from hurricanes and cyclones because they are much smaller in scale. The word became used for the destructive rotary funnel cloud usually beneath a mass of black cloud, especially in the U.S. Midwest, is by 1849.Tornadoes tend to occur over land and are most common in the central United States in an area dubbed “Tornado Alley”.
They are really cyclones
Hurricanes are technically a type of cyclone off the coasts of North America. The word cyclone is used to describe storms in the Indian Ocean and South Pacific (in Australia we call them tropical cyclones rather than hurricanes). Typhoons, similarly, are used to describe cyclones in south-east Asia for instance in the South China Sea. Tornadoes, of these four, are not cyclones but smaller localised more intense storms.
However, for the people of Florida, whatever we call the storm, we hope that the angry gods have calmed.