Earth & SkyGreek → English
Typhoon
/taɪˈfuːn/noun
A tropical cyclone of the western Pacific and the China seas.
The Greek roots
Τυφῶν
Typhôn
Typhon, storm giant
Literally: “the whirlwind monster”
Follow a root:Τυφῶν1 word
The story of the word
This word has more than one parent. English first shows it in the 1500s as touffon, arriving through Portuguese and Arabic ṭūfān, a deluge, which many trace back to Greek Τυφῶν, the hundred-headed monster Zeus buried under Etna and the father of destructive winds. The modern spelling and stress owe more to Cantonese tai fung, great wind, picked up by sailors in the China seas. Scholars disagree about how much of the word is genuinely Greek and how much simply came to look Greek in European mouths.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Arabic → Portuguese → English, reshaped by Chinese
- First recorded
- 1550s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
typhustyphoid
In a sentence
The typhoon shut Hong Kong's airport for two days.