Word of the Day:
cumulus
What It Means
A large white, puffy cloud that develops through convection.
Cumulus in Context
“In the sketch (which is taken about 75 Jovian days after that of the 2nd July) there is shown a dark copper-coloured streak along the southern margin of the south brown belt, butting on to a bluff-headed streak of cumulus cloud which may be the same remarkable bluff head noticed on July 2.”
Did You Know?
Learned borrowing from Latin cumulus. Doublet of comble. Sense 2 (“type of cloud”) was coined by the British chemist and amateur meteorologist Luke Howard (1772–1864): see the 1803 quotation.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: cumulus (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “cumulus.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cumulus. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
