tempest
pronunciation
How to pronounce tempest in British English:
UK [ˈtempɪst]
How to pronounce tempest in American English:
US [ˈtempɪst]
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- Noun:
- a violent commotion or disturbance
- (literary) a violent wind
Word Origin
- tempest
- tempest: [13] Latin tempestās started off meaning nothing more alarming than ‘period of time’ (it was a derivative of tempus ‘time’, source of English temporary). Gradually, however, it progressed via ‘weather’ to ‘bad weather, storm’. Tempus moved in to take its place in the neutral sense ‘weather’, and provides the word for ‘weather’ in modern French (temps), Italian (tempo), Spanish (tiempo), and Romanian (timp). Other languages whose word for ‘weather’ comes from a term originally denoting ‘time’ include Russian (pogoda), Polish (czas), Czech (počasí), Latvian (laiks), and Breton (amzer).=> temporary
- tempest (n.)
- "violent storm," late 13c., from Old French tempeste "storm; commotion, battle; epidemic, plague" (11c.), from Vulgar Latin *tempesta, from Latin tempestas "a storm; weather, season, time, point in time, season, period," also "commotion, disturbance," related to tempus "time, season" (see temporal). Sense evolution is from "period of time" to "period of weather," to "bad weather" to "storm." Words for "weather" originally were words for "time" in languages from Russia to Brittany. Figurative sense of "violent commotion" in English is recorded from early 14c. Tempest in a teapot attested from 1818; the image in other forms is older, such as storm in a creambowl (1670s).
Example
- 1. How the emerging world copes with the tempest will affect the world economy and politics for a long time
- 2. Earlier the tempest killed 29 people in the dominican republic and haiti .
- 3. The himalaya controversy followed another tempest -- the disclosure of e-mails that suggested that leading global warming scientists in the u.k. and the u.s. had conspired to hide a decline in global temperatures .
- 4. And while bloomberg 's office was clearly determined to corral this information tempest and did so , in my view , with some success it faced a tough challenge .
- 5. The controversy over the aig payouts is the latest manifestation of a political tempest that the white house has struggled to manage .