weather
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈwɛð.ə/
ipa: /ˈwɛð.ɚ/
rhymes: -ɛðə(ɹ)
homophone: wether
homophone: whether (wine–whine merger)
Forms: form: weathers
form: weathering
form: weathered
form: weathered
Etymology: From Middle English weder, wedir, from Old English weder, from Proto-West Germanic *wedr, from Proto-Germanic *wedrą, from Proto-Indo-European *wedʰrom (=*we-dʰrom), from *h₂weh₁- (“to blow”).
Cognates
Cognate with Scots wather (“weather”), Saterland Frisian Weeder (“weather”), Cimbrian bèttar (“weather”), Dutch weder, weer (“weather”), German Wetter (“weather”), Low German Weder (“weather”), Luxembourgish Wieder (“weather”), Yiddish וועטער (veter, “weather”), Danish vejr (“weather”), Faroese, Icelandic veður (“weather”), Norwegian Bokmål vær (“weather”), Norwegian Nynorsk veder, vêr (“weather”), Swedish väder (“weather”); also more distantly related to Russian вёдро (vjódro, “fair weather”) and perhaps Albanian vrëndë (“light rain”).
Other cognates include Sanskrit निर्वाण (nirvāṇa, “blown or put out, extinguished”).
Senses: examples: text: The organisms […] seem indestructible, while the hard matrix in which they are embedded has weathered from around them.
ref: 1856, Hugh Miller, The Cruise of the Betsey:
text: [An eagle] soaring through his wide empire of the air / To weather his broad sails.
ref: 1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 42:
glosses: To expose to the weather, or show the effects of such exposure, or to withstand such effects.
examples: text: "Come hither! come hither! my little daughter, / And do not tremble so; / For I can weather the roughest gale, That ever wind did blow."
ref: 1840 January 10, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “[Ballads.] w:The Wreck of the Hesperus.”, in Ballads and Other Poems, 2nd edition, Cambridge, Mass.: […] John Owen, published 1842, →OCLC, stanza 8, page 44:
text: April 18, 1850, Frederick William Robertson, An Address Delivered to the Members of the Working Man's Institute
You will weather the difficulties yet.
text: Some observers have contrasted China with the US, whose economy has weathered the post-Covid recovery better. Until recently, Americans may have feared the day China would overtake them as the world's largest economy, but now analysts doubt if this will happen.
ref: 2023 November 15, Tessa Wong, “Xi Jinping arrives in US as his Chinese Dream sputters”, in BBC:
glosses: To sustain the trying effect of; to bear up against and overcome; to endure; to resist.
glosses: To break down, of rocks and other materials, under the effects of exposure to rain, sunlight, temperature, and air.
examples: text: Lichens' ability to weather makes them a geological force, yet they do more than disolve the physical features of the world.
ref: 2020, Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life, page 85:
glosses: To cause (rocks) to break down by crushing, grinding, and/or dissolving with acids.
examples: text: to weather a cape    to weather another ship
topics: nautical
transport
glosses: To pass to windward in a vessel, especially to beat 'round.
examples: text: Joshua weathered a collision with a freighter near South Africa.
topics: nautical
transport
glosses: To endure or survive an event or action without undue damage.
examples: text: If your hawk is bad-weathered, that is, will not fit on your fist when the wind blows, but hales, and beats, and hangs by the jeſſes, ſhe has an ill habit of the worſt kind.
ref: 1773, James Campbell, A Treatise on modern faulconry:
topics: falconry
hobbies
hunting
lifestyle
glosses: To place (a hawk) unhooded in the open air.
examples: text: But there's no law against taking pictures when it's weathering out there, and you're likely to produce some beautiful, if not different, images for your efforts. All that's needed is to dress your camera for the weather[…]
ref: 1982, Fredrik D. Bodin, How to Get the Best Travel Photographs:
glosses: To rain; to storm.
Derived terms: overweather
unweather
weather the storm