Roots of Winter
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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook. Have you noticed lately that it's gotten colder, wetter and darker earlier in the day? Know what that's called? I bet you do and Zhenya Gallon tells us where that word comes from.

What are winters like in your neck of the woods? Mostly rainy, or more often white with snow? In Colorado we get plenty of the white stuff-most of it after the official start of winter. In the fall, the tilt of earth's axis leans the Northern Hemisphere further and further away from the sun. The days keep getting shorter until the solstice, the shortest day of the year. With fewer and fewer hours of heating by the sun, you know it's winter.

Linguists think the word winter comes from the root *wed-, which meant water, or wet, in Indo-European. No one's ever heard this 8,000-year-old tongue, but scholars have traced sounds in half the world's living languages back to its Indo-European speakers. Where did they live? Their names for the seasons, terrain, and species of trees suggest somewhere between Armenia and the land north of the Black Sea.

There's another candidate for winter's origins: *wind-, meaning white-the white season. Whether it was *wed-* or *wind-, at some point it became the more nasal*wend-, perhaps because of a winter head cold! That sound transformed into wintruz-the wet season in Old German. Old Saxons said wintar, and we've been saying winter since the earliest days of Old English, in the first millennium.

My winter's been wet and white this year. So for me, either root will do, as I ponder the connections language gives us to ancient people and the cycle of the seasons.

Zhenya Gallon plows through words and snowdrifts in Boulder, Colorado. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mt. Washington Observatory and is supported generously by Subaru of America. Thanks today to executive engineer Sean Doucette.