This is a very arbitrary piece of information, but would you believe it when I told you that the Scots were working through the Scottish Thesaurus, they realized there are over 400 words or expressions for snow in the language!!
The University of Glascow were planning on publishing the Thesaurus online and were working on the project when they realized there were 421 words.
They must have some serious need to speak of the fluffy cold white stuff!!
Let's go through some of these words in www.scotsthesaurus.org :
- snaw - snow
- sneesl - to begin to rain or snow
- eefle - to swirl Credit
- flindrikin - a slight snow shower
- snaw-pouther - fine driving snow
- spitters - small drops or flakes of wind-driven rain or snow
- unbrak - the beginning of a thaw
- Katty-clean-doors - a child's name for snow (I like this one!)
- Snow-smoor - suffocation by snow (this has happened so many times that there is a term for it?) Credit
- skelf - a large snowflake (there are many progressive skelf's in the world these days LOL!! I shall now dub them Skelf's!!) Credit
Other words
Snow isn't the only subject with many words, for they found that there are 369 words for MARBLES!!
Dr Rennie from the university, who lectures in English and Scottish language said the following about the many marble expressions: "You might expect sports like football and golf to loom large in the thesaurus, but it turns out that there are actually more words relating to marbles - which is an indication of how popular the game has been with generations of Scottish children."
More interesting snow facts:
- Did you know that the term "white Christmas" is incorrect? White is in fact not white at all. In fact because it is just frozen water it is in fact translucent. However when the light is passing through the flakes, it reflects and refracts through the flake, and sends the entire spectrum back into our eyes.....therefore the white colour.
Credit - If you buy a Christmas tree ornament with 8 sides to it, get rid of it! It defies the laws of science!! That is because every single snowflake has 6 sides to it. The water molecules of the flakes are always resulted in a six sided crystal.
Credit - Chionophobia is a term that is most probably unknown, and it means the fear of snow
Credit - The record for the most snow to fall in a day is held by a town in Italy called Capracotta. Over 100 inches (2.54m) in 18 hours fell on March 2015. That's 12.7cm every hour!!
Credit - There are rules before you can call a snowstorm a blizzard. According to the National weather service, a blizzard must have large amounts of snow, winds blowing over 35 miles per hour, and visibility of less than a quarter mile.
Credit - 75% of all fresh water on about 10% of the earth's surface is found in snow and ice!!
- The Guinness world record for the smallest snowman every built is 122ft tall! It took a woman in Bethel, Maine over a month to build.
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