A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
nimbus
Nimbus means rain-bearing, and in the cloud classification it appears as a prefix or a suffix marking the clouds that actually produce precipitation: nimbostratus, the flat gray sheet that rains steadily for hours, and cumulonimbus, the towering storm cloud. The same word also names the disc or ring of light around a sacred figure in painting.
Etymology
The word is Latin for a cloud, and specifically a rain cloud, and it carried a second Roman sense of a bright cloud or a radiance surrounding a god, which is where the halo meaning comes from. Luke Howard used it in 1803 as one of his original four cloud names, alongside cirrus, cumulus, and stratus, and it is the only one of the four that has been demoted from a type to a modifier.
Notes
Howard’s system was one of the great successes of scientific naming, adopted almost immediately and still in use, and it worked because he chose Latin words that described the shape rather than the weather. Goethe was so taken with it that he wrote a set of poems, one for each cloud.