Weather in more detail

The thirteenth entry is o furacão, and it is one of the very few words on this page that did not come out of Latin. It came out of the Caribbean. Taíno, spoken in the Greater Antilles, had hurakán for the storm that arrives every summer; Spanish sailors wrote it down as huracán; and from Spanish it went out to the rest of Europe — into English as « hurricane », into Portuguese as o furacão. English spelled it a dozen ways before it settled, which is what happens to a word that is heard long before it is read. Two senses then have to be kept apart. In ordinary English a « hurricane » is an Atlantic storm with a name and a track, and its opposite number in the Pacific is a « typhoon », a word that reached us from the other side of the world. But on the Beaufort scale « hurricane force » is simply force twelve, and force twelve can be reached anywhere, including off the coast this list has in mind. So ventos de furacão in a forecast is usually the second sense: not a named storm at all, but a number.