Language Matters | Where does the word ‘typhoon’ come from? It’s not what you might think

Ragasa – “a surge, a rush, a sudden quickening of motion” in Tagalog – is an apt name for the world’s most powerful tropical cyclone this year, which peaked as a super typhoon, and from which northern Philippines, Taiwan and southern China are just recovering. Typhoons, together with cyclones and hurricanes, are some of the most destructive weather phenomena. They originate over warm tropical waters and comprise intense rotating storm systems of clouds and thunderstorms, with diameters from 200km (124 miles) up to 1,000km and winds exceeding 119km/h. They are collectively classified by meteorologists under the overarching term “tropical cyclones”. Typhoon, hurricane and cyclone are, in fact, region-specific names that developed from cultures or encounters in the locale. Tropical cyclones that form in the North Atlantic and the eastern/central North Pacific oceans, affecting the United States East Coast and the Caribbean, are termed hurricanes. The name comes from the languages of the Taíno, a subgroup of the original Arawak inhabitants of the Greater Antilles. It is a word for the powerful storms unleashed by their goddess of chaos, which was adopted by the 16th-century Spanish conquistadors. Meanwhile, tropical cyclones that form over the South Pacific and Indian Ocean, affecting countries from Australia all the way to Mozambique, are known as cyclones. The term was coined in 1848 by a British East India Company official to describe such a devastating storm in India in 1789. Finally, tropical cyclones that form over the Northwest Pacific Ocean, particularly affecting the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and southern China, are called typhoons. The word typhoon is, unsurprisingly, popularly ascribed to Chinese 颱風 or “great wind” – Cantonese daaihfùng, Mandarin táifēng – but this is a more recent formulation. The etymology of typhoon is actually more intriguing. A clear origin lies in Arabic. El-ṭūfān, occurring in two passages of the Qur’an, describes a flood or storm and deluge, possibly deriving from ṭāfa “to turn round” – tūfān also then designates a typical storm of the seas between Arabia and China. Likely developing from Greek typho – the mythological hundred-headed, flame-breathing giant, father of the winds – by the seventh century via maritime trade or the translations of Aristotle, it spread to Persian as tufân and thereafter to Urdu as ṭūfān. The latter was heavily influenced by Arabic and Persian through the late first millennium Muslim conquests and 12th to 16th century Persianised Central Asian dynasties on the Indian subcontinent. There, the word was adopted in European travellers’ writings: the earliest printed mention was Portuguese tufão, in traveller-writer Pinto’s 1540 Peregrinação (“pilgrimage”). Portuguese explorers would also have had direct transmission from Arab pilots in the long-standing maritime trade network of the Indian Ocean. Subsequent European colonisers adopted Portuguese borrowings. A first English form is found in a 1588 English translation of Venetian merchant-traveller Federici’s account, as touffon, with other English writings through the 17th and 18th centuries employing variant spellings including tufan, tuffon, toofan, tuffoon. In China, accounts of such violent storms were also attested over the centuries, including by individuals in ancient times in unofficial documents. The earliest scientific description and mention of typhoons is in the fifth-century Nan Yue Zhi or “Book of the Southern Yue Region”, as 颶風 – jùfēng in Pinyin – described as “winds coming from four directions”. The character created, 颶 or jù, has been interpreted as “fearful wind” and “disastrous winds from the sea” and was widely used in the Tang (618-907) and Northern Song (960-1279) dynasties. Other documented terms are noted for southern Zhejiang and Fujian language varieties – for example, fengchi and chifeng. Taifeng only starts being used from the 16th century onwards: modern Chinese likely reanalysed jufeng to taifeng, through later regional maritime trade and contact, also possibly due to influence from Jesuit priests working in the imperial palaces. This reinforced and modified English usage, with 18th/19th-century writings about the China coast reflecting this pronunciation with spelling tiffoon. By the early 1800s, spelling shifts to tyfoon, possibly by association with Greek typhon or “whirlwind”, and finally stabilises to typhoon.

Language Matters | Where does the word ‘typhoon’ come from? It’s not what you might think

‘Typhoon’ is popularly ascribed to similar-sounding Cantonese and Mandarin words, but this is a more recent formulation