It’s Raining, It’s Mizzling…
By: Emily Morgan
Tags: Learning, History, English, Writing, Language

It’s Raining, It’s Mizzling…

Words from today and yesterday, inspired by our amazing weather.

Photo by June Admiraal on Unsplash

Rain, Rain, Go Away…

Actually it stopped raining yesterday, but staring out of the window started me thinking about the weather again. I love the changing climates where I live now. I spent years living in Perth, Western Australia, where it was always hot, just sometimes hot and humid and sometimes hot and dry. Here, in glorious little Tasmania, we get all four seasons clearly delineated and it’s a joy to experience.

Today I’m interested in weather words. Misty, rainy, cloudy, snowy, windy, sunny. Sleet, drizzle, hail, frost. But have you heard of maumy? Or mizzle?

Maumy, according to the OED means ‘insipid’ weather, mild and humid. Not the type of word an Australian would probably use to describe a humid summer day, nor would a Singaporean, I suspect. New Orleans, Houston and Orlando probably don’t have too many maumy days, either. But our English cousins might have a legitimate use for it. I can easily picture a maumy English afternoon.

Mizzle means drizzle — I love this word! And fully intend to use it at the next opportunity. It first appeared in writing in 1490 and was still being used in 1990 — perhaps some of you use it, but it was completely new to me.

That’s another thing I love about investigating language.

When I look at unusual word lists in blogs and articles, I will often encounter words I may not consider to be unusual at all. In my part of the world, perhaps even in just my own family, these words flourish still. But in other parts of the world, they are utterly unknown, despite our so-called shared global English. And I know that the reverse is also true.

The Oxford English Dictionary is a wonderful place — I love to browse its fantastic online resource for inspiration and to learn more about my language. Even the free sections are full of wonderful stuff. Check it out on your next rainy afternoon. If you want to go diving into variants of languages, look for wonderful dictionaries of dialects and variants such as the Dictionary of the Scots Language, the Aussie Slang Dictionary or the EDD Online, based on the acclaimed English Dialect Dictionary by Joseph Wright (1898 to 1905).

It’s just a pity that we Aussies haven’t found more wonderful weather words of our own. A scorcher meaning a hot day, that’s well and good. A stinker, meaning a very hot day, fine. But not exactly inventive. We do have sparrow’s fart to mean dawn — sorry, so crude. But I struggled to think of anything we say about rain, other than pissing down, which I think is fairly international. We do have pretty big rainstorms, but obviously our daily obsession with hot weather has sapped all our energy for weather word creation. Storms and other weather has been left high and dry (see what I did there?).

The Americans have been much more inventive in this regard. I found a marvelous list of weather words from US English including such weather events as a Bear’s Cage and a Beaver’s Tail — not sure how well known most of them are, but they certainly show an appreciation and respect for Mother Nature in this land of storms and extremes.

We’ve always had weather.

Back in the mists of time, there were some rather wonderful phrases and words which might deserve a revival. We’ve already met maumy and mizzle. Here are three more to brighten your cloudy day!

A Scots word for a spell of cold weather in early spring that would make the freshly shorn sheep (ewes, or yowes) shiver with cold (tremmle). ‘Brr, it’s a bit of a yowe-tremmle today, kids! Get your coats on!’

From as early as 1623, we have this lovely little word describing ‘the warmeness of the Sunne in Winter.’

Benumbed, paralyzed with cold — this one, I couldn’t confirm in any dictionary but go hunting, word sleuths, and you just might get lucky.

I challenge you to devise your very own new weather word: take a look at the View from Your Window and see what you come up with!