50 KINDS OF SNOW

Some people are very fond of white landscapes, others less so. There are, however, people for whom snow is such an inescapable phenomenon, affecting every aspect of their lives, that words to describe it make up a large part of the vocabulary of their language.
Northerners, such as the Sami in Scandinavia and the Inuit in Alaska, have around 50 such words. Finnish can describe snow and ice in almost 40 different ways, with separate terms for snow falling on the surface of water - hyhmä, a thin layer of fresh snow on ice - iljanne, or ice covered with frost - tökkö.

GHOSTS AND SHEEP

But it turns out that the language with the most words related to snow, cold and bad weather (which was, and still is, apparently a much-discussed topic) is spoken by a completely different nation. Researchers at the University of Glasgow are working on a project to create a thesaurus of all Scottish words used throughout history. They have identified over 400 quirky, lesser-known ways of describing winter weather and the circumstances that go along with it (which can be found at scotsthesaurus.org). These include flukra - large snowflakes, spitters - small snowflakes, snaw-breaker - a sheep that clears the way for the rest of the flock in heavy snow, snaw-ghast - a snowdrift that looks like a ghost, and finally snaw-smoor - suffocation by snow....

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