Earth & SkyGreek → English
Climate
/ˈklaɪmɪt/noun
The typical weather of a place, taken over decades.
The Greek roots
κλίμα
klíma
slope, inclination
Literally: “the tilt, the slope”
Follow a root:κλίμα1 word
The story of the word
κλίμα means a slope, from κλίνειν, to lean, and it referred to the angle at which the earth's surface tilts away from the sun as you move north. Greek geographers divided the inhabited world into klimata, bands of latitude, so a climate was originally a strip on a map and only afterwards a kind of weather. The same leaning verb gives incline and decline, and, by way of κλίνη, a bed, the clinic where medicine is practised at the bedside.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
inclinedeclineclinicclinometer
In a sentence
The climate here suits vines now, which nobody would have said in 1980.