A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1068 entries
brume
Fog or mist, in the literary register — the word you reach for when fog is too flat. It carries a suggestion of cold and of winter that the plainer words do not, and English writers have used it for two centuries mostly for that reason. The adjective is brumous, which is a good deal more common than the noun.
Etymology
English took it from French brume, fog, which in Old French meant wintertime, from Latin brūma, winter — and brūma is a worn-down superlative, brevima from brevissima, the shortest, from brevis, short. Latin named the winter solstice as the shortest day and then let the word expand to mean the whole season, and French let the season’s weather take the word over. So the word for fog is, underneath, the word for brief. It is a cousin of brief, brevity, abbreviate, embrace, and — by a long route through Latin bracchium, the short arm — pretzel.