cloud
Part of speech: noun
verb
Morphological type: simple
Topics: communications
electrical-engineering
engineering
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
telecommunications
Etymology: From Middle English cloud, from Old English clūd (“mass of stone, rock, boulder, hill”), from Proto-West Germanic *klūt, from Proto-Germanic *klūtaz, *klutaz (“lump, mass, conglomeration”), from Proto-Indo-European *gel- (“to ball up, clench”).
Cognate with Scots clood, clud (“cloud”), Dutch kluit (“lump, mass, clod”), German Low German Kluut, Kluute (“lump, mass, ball”), German Kloß (“lump, ball, dumpling”), Danish klode (“sphere, orb, planet”), Swedish klot (“sphere, orb, ball, globe”), Icelandic klót (“knob on a sword's hilt”). Related to English clod, clot, clump, club. Largely replaced Middle English wolken, from Old English wolcn (whence Modern English welkin), the commonest Germanic word (compare Dutch wolk, German Wolke).
Inflected forms:
form: clouds
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: cloude
pos: noun
tags: alternative
Early
Modern
form: clowd
pos: noun
tags: alternative
Early
Modern
form: clouds
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: clouding
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: clouded
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: clouded
pos: verb
tags: past
form: cloude
pos: verb
tags: alternative
Early
Modern
form: clowd
pos: verb
tags: alternative
Early
Modern
Senses:
gloss: A visible mass of water droplets suspended in the air.
pos: noun
examples: While he thus ſpake, there came a cloud, and ouerſhadowed them, ⁊ they feared, as they entred into the cloude.
So this was my future home, I thought![…]Backed by towering hills, the but faintly discernible purple line of the French boundary off to the southwest, a sky of palest Gobelin flecked with fat, fleecy little clouds, it in truth looked a dear little city; the city of one's dreams.
gloss: Any mass of dust, steam or smoke resembling such a mass.
pos: noun
examples: Since the mid-1980s, when Indonesia first began to clear its bountiful forests on an industrial scale in favour of lucrative palm-oil plantations, “haze” has become an almost annual occurrence in South-East Asia. The cheapest way to clear logged woodland is to burn it, producing an acrid cloud of foul white smoke that, carried by the wind, can cover hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles.
gloss: Anything which makes things foggy or gloomy.
pos: noun
examples: But in one part of the horizon a cloud lay, and the rulers of India were oppressed with a sense of coming disaster. This cloud had begun to form in 1873, and had been continually growing larger; it threw a shadow over gold-debtor nations, and shed a depressing influence over gold-using countries.
gloss: Anything unsubstantial.
pos: noun
tags: figuratively
gloss: A dark spot on a lighter material or background.
pos: noun
gloss: A group or swarm, especially suspended above the ground or flying.
pos: noun
examples: He opened the door and was greeted by a cloud of bats.
so great a cloud of witnesses
The place was horribly haunted by clouds of mosquitoes and every form of flying pest, so we were glad to find solid ground again and to make a circuit among the trees, which enabled us to outflank this pestilent morass, which droned like an organ in the distance, so loud was it with insect life.
gloss: An elliptical shape or symbol whose outline is a series of semicircles, supposed to resemble a cloud.
pos: noun
examples: The comic-book character's thoughts appeared in a cloud above his head.
gloss: A telecom network (from their representation in engineering drawings).
pos: noun
gloss: The Internet, regarded as an abstract amorphous omnipresent space for processing and storage, the focus of cloud computing.
pos: noun
tags: with-definite-article
examples: Now we are liberal with our innermost secrets, spraying them into the public ether with a generosity our forebears could not have imagined. Where we once sent love letters in a sealed envelope, or stuck photographs of our children in a family album, now such private material is despatched to servers and clouds operated by people we don't know and will never meet.
[…]the cloud could do this, it could do that. The cloud could be powerful and intelligent. It became a business buzzword and a selling point.
“But there’s no fucking cloud,” says Crabapple, “there’s other people’s computers. There are vast datacentres that are sucking up water and electricity and rare-earth metals, literally boiling up the planet […]”
gloss: A negative or foreboding aspect of something positive: see every cloud has a silver lining or every silver lining has a cloud.
pos: noun
tags: figuratively
examples: But when he found that some of his interrogatories were evaded, and others answered undecisively, the look of gentleness which he had assumed, vanished, and his brow wore the cloud of disappointment and of anger.
The only cloud on their night was that injury to Rafael, who was followed off the pitch by his anxious brother Fabio as he was stretchered away down the tunnel.
gloss: Crystal methamphetamine.
pos: noun
tags: slang
gloss: A large, loosely-knitted headscarf worn by women.
pos: noun
gloss: A white cat.
pos: noun
tags: Internet
endearing
humorous
gloss: A rock; boulder; a hill.
pos: noun
tags: obsolete
gloss: To become foggy or gloomy, or obscured from sight.
pos: verb
tags: intransitive
examples: The glass clouds when you breathe on it.
gloss: To overspread or hide with a cloud or clouds.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: The sky is clouded.
gloss: Of the breath, to become cloud; to turn into mist.
pos: verb
examples: The horses stamping
Their warm breath clouding
In the sharp and frosty morning
Of the day.
gloss: To make obscure.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: All this talk about human rights is clouding the real issue.
gloss: To make less acute or perceptive.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: Your emotions are clouding your judgement.
The tears began to well up and cloud my vision.
gloss: To make gloomy or sullen.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: One day too late, I fear me, noble lord,
 Hath clouded all thy happy days on earth.
Be not disheartened, then, nor cloud those looks.
gloss: To blacken; to sully; to stain; to tarnish (reputation or character).
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: I would not be a stander-by to hear
 My sovereign mistress clouded so, without
 My present vengeance taken.
gloss: To mark with, or darken in, veins or sports; to variegate with colors.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: to cloud yarn
The nice conduct of a clouded cane
gloss: To become marked, darkened or variegated in this way.
pos: verb
tags: intransitive
Synonyms: cloud
Related words: fog
mist
nebulous
:Category:Clouds
Derived words: accessory cloud
acloud
banner cloud
becloud
blow a cloud
brown cloud
cap cloud
cloud 9
cloudage
cloud bank
cloud base
cloudberry
cloud bow
cloud bread
cloud-built
cloudburst
cloud-burst
cloud burst
cloudbust
cloudbuster
cloudbusting
cloud canal
cloudcapt
cloud-capt
cloudcast
cloud ceiling
cloud chamber
cloud chaser
cloud chasing
cloud cisticola
cloud computing
cloud cover
cloud-cuckoo-land
cloud cuckoo land
cloud cuckoo-land
cloud deck
cloud deer
cloud ear
cloud egg
clouden
clouder
cloudery
cloudfall
cloud-first
cloud forest
cloudform
cloudfree
cloudful
cloud genus
cloud-headed
cloud hole
cloudification
cloudify
cloudiness
cloudish
cloud kitchen
cloudland
cloudless
cloudlet
cloudlike
cloudline
cloudling
cloudly
cloud mass
cloud mining
cloud-native
cloud nine
cloud number nine
cloud of title
cloudogram
cloud on title
cloud over
Cloud Peak
cloud point
cloud rap
cloud rat
cloud-ridden
cloudrunner
cloudscape
cloudscraper
Clouds Creek
cloudseed
cloud-seeding
cloud seeding
cloud seven
cloud slime
cloud species
cloudspotter
cloudspotting
cloud storage
cloud street
cloud suck
cloud-to-ground
cloudtop
cloud up
cloudwash
cloudwashed
cloudwater
cloudwise
cloudy
crest cloud
dark cloud
decloud
discloud
dustcloud
electron cloud
encloud
every cloud has a silver lining
every dark cloud has a silver lining
fire cloud
get off of someone's cloud
have one's head in the clouds
hole punch cloud
intercloud
interstellar cloud
intracloud
iridescent cloud
Kordylewski cloud
label cloud
Land of the Long White Cloud
lenticular cloud
mother-of-pearl cloud
multicloud
nacreous cloud
night-shining cloud
noctilucent cloud
old man yelling at a cloud
old man yelling at cloud
old-man-yells-at-cloud
old man yells at cloud
on cloud nine
on cloud seven
overcloud
pink cloud syndrome
polar mesospheric cloud
polar stratospheric cloud
punch hole cloud
raincloud
recloud
Red Cloud
revision cloud
roll cloud
shelf cloud
smokecloud
snowcloud
snow cloud
standing cloud
stormcloud
storm cloud
storm-cloud
subcloud
sub-cloud car
supercloud
thunder cloud
thundercloud
twain cloud
uncloud
under a cloud
wall cloud
White Cloud
Wilson cloud
wind-cloud
word cloud
zeppelins in a cloud
zodiacal cloud
Translations: