Hiemal, Brumal, Algid & Other Wintry Wordlets
Winter’s root is wet, literally. The same Germanic root that gives our words water and wet makes the first vowel nasal and so adds an ‘n’, thus *ued > *wet > *went > *wint > winter. Thus winter is closely related to other English words like water and otter!
Druids’ Winter
Or, winter may stretch all the way back to a root form in Proto-Indo-European *ueid that gives Celtic words for ‘white’; compare for example Old Irish find ‘white’ and many other Celtic cognates like Welsh gwyn ‘white’ and perhaps even the Druids ‘people of the white oak’ from *dru-ueid or oak-white. Dru means ‘oak tree’ and there are two PIE morphemes represented as *ueid. The second *ueid means ‘know, see.’ One of its reflexes in English is the word wit with its prime meaning of insight. In Latin, PIE *ueid displays as videre ‘to see.’ Take *dru and *ueid compounded to make the word Druid, and the Druids could be the ‘oak-knowers’ based on their veneration of the oak tree and its mistletoe.
Classical Winter Words
 English borrows Latin and Greek words for coldness and winter to obtain both poetic and medical words. The most common Latin word for winter is hiems, from which English derives a learned adjective hiemal ‘taking place in winter, pertaining to winter.’ Latin hiems is cognate with these Indo-European relatives: Greek χειμώνας heimonas ‘winter’, Greek χιών chion ‘snow’, Sanskrit हेमन्त hemanta ‘winter,’ literally ‘snowing time’ and Russian зима zima.
From the Jan 22, 2012 page at www.nikiyoga.com I learned this: There is a Hindu god of snow, Himavat. In Sanskrit, himavant conveys “having much snow,” coming from the word himá “frost, snow. The Himalaya ‘abode of snow’ Mountains got their name from Sanskrit himá ‘ snow’ + Sanskrit alaya ‘home.’
Rare in modern English, the word hiems is used memorably as a poetic personification of winter by William Shakespeare in the opening scene of Act 2 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Titania, queen of the fairies, tells her husband Oberon that even the moon is displeased with their quarrels and consequently the very seasons of the year are changed.
TITANIA
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And through this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set . . .”
The Quarrel of Titania & Oberon, the fairy Queen and King
Brumal
Brumal, a Latin-derived wintry adjective I like, bears a blustery, blizzard-riven sound. Brumal chills freeze and peel the very skin from your shivering bones. In classical Latin, bruma referred to the shortest day of the year. The word is contracted from a superlative form of the simple Latin adjective brevis ‘short,’ brevima, itself a contraction of brevissima, a feminine superlative adjective nominative, possibly from a phrase like dies brevissima ‘the shortest day’ [of the winter solstice].
Secondarily in Latin, bruma meant midwinter but was nowhere near as common as hiems. Ancient winter feast days named Brumalia are mentioned in Roman literature. Winter sea fogs are brumal. They tumble across frosted docks and cling to the matted felt of pea jackets.
French borrowed bruma too, first as la brume ‘short winter day’ but in modern French it means haze, sea mist or fog. In 1938 director Marcel Carné made a beautiful film of poetic realism called Le Quai des brumes starring three of the great early actors of French talkies: Jean Gabin, Michel Simon and Michèle Morgan. The film title is usually translated as “Port of Shadows” but that is pallid beside its much punchier literal meaning “Wharf of Fogs.”
Just after the Fr. Revolution, when the monthly calendar was changed, February for a brief time was rechristened Brumaire ‘month of wintry fogs.’
Boreal
All Hail, Boreas (depicted above), god of winter, tyrian-winged wind god of the north, who blows down from cold mountains of Thrace, all-chilling with breath of ice. To the north, beyond (Greek hyper) his mountain home, lay Hyperborea, a land of eternal spring which was never touched by the god’s cold wind.
The adjective boreal in English means pertaining to the north; situated on the northern side; of a northern character; of or pertaining to the north wind, located or living in a cold place.
An ancient Greek rural belief was that fecund winds Boreas and Zephyros would sweep down upon early spring pastures where mares in heat waited to be fertilized by the horses of the spring wind, ghostly stallions but full of equine vigor. Horses born from these couplings were best of breed.
Internet bit: “In Greek vase painting, Boreas was depicted as a striding, winged god. Sometimes his hair and beard were spiked with ice. In mosaic art, he often appears as a gust-blowing head with bloated cheeks up among the clouds. This imagery carried over into post-Classical art, and is frequently found in old maps.”
Afterwinter & Back-Winter
Both these terms name a return to winter temperatures after spring weather has already begun or simply cold, muddy weather leading up to real spring.
Robin Storm: A Canadian After-Winter Phrase
You’ve opened the cottage, primed the pump, set the summer chairs on the new cedar deck, shared a  christening goblet of Château Qui Sait?, and, just as you settle into the hammock to imbibe the piney brio of it all, a thick snow squall blows in across the lake to welcome the start of June. It’s a late-in-the-season storm familiar to most Canadians, and some call it a robin storm, in an attempt to lessen its chill by invoking one of our cheerful spring birds, the robin.
Lapwing Winter
To birders in Denmark and Scandinavia, a cold snap in the spring is a lapwing-winter or a lapwing-snow, because it arrives just as lapwing birds return.
Blackberry Winter
In the southern United States, a period of cold weather late in the spring is a blackberry winter, because it happens often just as the blackberry bushes set buds or bloom. It’s the title of a wonderful 1946 novella by American novelist Robert Penn Warren who captures rural Tennessee slang and a young boy’s innocence, depicting it as well as any American writer ever did.
Hibernate
English supplies verbs to describe what the critters do seasonally. To hibernate is to pass the winter in a state of torpor. Hiberna is a Roman military word for ‘winter camp,’ related to hiems ‘winter.’ To estivate is to the pass the summer so. But we need a verb to describe what many do all the year round. With due humility, I suggest totannate from Latin, totum ‘all’ + annus ‘year’ meaning ‘to pass the entire year in a state of torpor.’
Algid
Rarest of the cold synonyms, poor, tiny, freezing wordlet algid crouches furtively in the less read pages of medical literature where it means ‘very cold,’ from Latin algidus ‘cold’ from algere ‘to be cold.’ One may still read of algid cholera where the patient is damp and clammy instead of moist and hot.
I do like its noun algor which has a distinct wintry brrr! about it. She treated his begging for forgiveness with utter algor. In Victorian medicine, algor referred to the chills that often mark the onset of a fever.
To Inwinter or Not
Finally, a neat English verb, to inwinter, is to protect sheep or other domestic animals by sheltering them inside barns or other structures during viciously cold inclemency that might kill them. Inwintering brood ewes is still safe farm practice.
Bleak Jack Frost may still make cheek raw and red, but we are at least two or three winter words up on the rimy rascal.
Bridge in Winter, a woodblock by Utagawa Hiroshige, 1797 – 1858 CE
copyright © William Gordon Casselman 2012
Click above graphic to read
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