the.com/gale
a wind too proud to whisper and too busy to apologize for your umbrella.
means A very strong wind, formally a sustained blow between roughly 32 and 63 miles per hour on the scale sailors use.
from Likely from Old Norse — compare the dialectal Norwegian 'galen,' meaning mad or frantic, which fits a wind behaving badly. The word surfaces in English around the 16th century, and its earliest sense leaned toward a 'sudden squall' before settling into the steadier, stronger blow we mean today. The exact path is a little hazy, so the Norse 'mad wind' is the best honest guess rather than a certainty.
- wind speed
- Officially 39 to 54 mph on the Beaufort scale
- origin
- Word's roots are stubbornly unknown to etymologists
- sailor talk
- Whole gales arrive when the sea turns white
- naming logic
- Beaufort scale ranks fresh, strong, and severe gales
- laughter link
- A gale of laughter borrows the storm's force
gale of the boroughs — dorothy gale, protagonist of the wonderful wizard of oz (1900), transported from kansas to oz
gale warning — u.s. national weather service alert for sustained winds of 32-63 knots issued daily across atlantic and pacific waters
great gale of 1703 — storm that struck southern england in november 1703, killing over 2,000 people and destroying ships including hms association