Word.ws English Dictionary

nuclear winter

nuclear winter noun: a predicted drop in global temperature following a nuclear war due to dust in the upper atmosphere reducing sunlight reaching the ground.

Noun

nuclear winter (plural nuclear winters)

  1. A predicted drop in global temperature following a nuclear war due to dust in the upper atmosphere reducing sunlight reaching the ground.
    • Scientists from the United States, the Soviet Union and other countries will meet in the Vatican Monday to discuss “nuclear winter,” the chilling climatic effect a nuclear war could have on the earth.1984 January 23, “Parley on ‘Nuclear Winter’”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
    • The global temperature declines predicted in the original (1983) nuclear winter scientific paper were 15-20°C; current estimates are 10-15°C. The two values are in good agreement considering the irreducible uncertainties in the calculations. Both temperature declines are much greater than the...1995, Carl Sagan, “When Scientists Know Sin”, in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1st edition, New York: Random House, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 286

nuclear winter meaning in Tamil, Malay and Indonesian

nuclear winter in Tamil

அணுஆயுதப்போர் குளிர்காலம்

nuclear winter in Malay

predicted drop in global temperature following a nuclear war
musim sejuk nuklear

nuclear winter in Indonesian

predicted drop in global temperature following a nuclear war
musim dingin nuklir

Examples of nuclear winter in a sentence

  • The global temperature declines predicted in the original (1983) nuclear winter scientific paper were 15-20°C; current estimates are 10-15°C.1995, Carl Sagan, “When Scientists Know Sin”, in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1st edition, New York: Random...
  • When the salarians discovered them, the krogan were a brutal, primitive species struggling to survive a self-inflicted nuclear winter.2008, BioWare, Mass Effect (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Krogan Codex entry:

Forms of nuclear winter

pluralnuclear winters

Origin of nuclear winter

Coined by Richard P. Turco et al. in a 1983 paper.

Words formed from nuclear winter

Questions about nuclear winter

What does nuclear winter mean?
Nuclear winter means a predicted drop in global temperature following a nuclear war due to dust in the upper atmosphere reducing sunlight reaching the ground.
What is nuclear winter in Tamil?
Nuclear winter in Tamil is அணுஆயுதப்போர் குளிர்காலம். See Nuclear winter meaning in Tamil.
How do you use nuclear winter in a sentence?
The global temperature declines predicted in the original (1983) nuclear winter scientific paper were 15-20°C; current estimates are 10-15°C.
What part of speech is nuclear winter?
Nuclear winter is a noun.
What is the plural of nuclear winter?
The plural of nuclear winter is nuclear winters.

Words near nuclear winter in the dictionary

  1. nuclear wars
  2. nuclear waste
  3. nuclear wastes
  4. nuclear weapon
  5. nuclear weapons
  6. nuclear winter
  7. nuclear winters
  8. nuclear-armed
  9. nuclear-electric rocket
  10. nuclear-electric rockets
  11. nuclear-free

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nuclear winter (page history and authors); nuclear winter (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “nuclear winter.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nuclear_winter. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.