A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
cyclone
A cyclone is any large mass of air rotating around a low-pressure center, counterclockwise north of the equator and clockwise south of it. The word covers the tropical version and the ordinary mid-latitude low, and in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific it is the standard name for what the Atlantic calls a hurricane and the northwest Pacific calls a typhoon. The rotation is a consequence of the earth turning underneath the moving air.
Etymology
The word was coined in 1848 by Henry Piddington, a British ship captain turned harbor official in Calcutta, who had spent years collecting sailors’ accounts of storms in the Bay of Bengal and worked out that the wind circulated rather than blowing straight. He built the name from a Greek word for a coil, and by his own account he had a coiled snake in mind. The point was practical: He wanted captains to understand that you escape such a storm by sailing across its track, not by running from the wind.
Notes
Piddington published his findings as The Sailor’s Horn-book for the Law of Storms and included cardboard transparent overlays a captain could lay on a chart to work out where the center lay from the wind direction on deck. He also warned the government that the new port at Kolkata was badly sited for storm surge, which was ignored.