harmattan

Examples

• All

• Rainfall records are spotty, but other worrisome developments—changes in flora and the more frequent appearance of harmattan dust—point to a serious decline in moisture levels.

  Academic text (2004)

• The road was still unpaved most of the way, and we had made the trip during the harmattan, when the wind was driving the sand forward in waves, and when each thorny bush had been pressed to the ground.

  Fiction book (1998)

• All this is a result of the Harmattan, which is a dry West African trade wind blowing south from the Sahara Desert into the region between November and March.

  Blog text (5)

• The harmattan, a cold, dry wind from the Sahara previously unknown in the forest, has now swept through the Tai forest every year since 1986.

  Academic text (1991)

• The harmattan, the Saharan winter wind, had been blowing from the northeast since November, hard enough to fill the sky with dust but not strongly enough to carry sand.

  Academic text (2002)

• Harmattan dust blows in on softer, more constant winds, filling the air with a haze for weeks on end.

  Academic text (2002)

• In November, when the dry harmattan breeze turned people's skin ashen white, Father opened a bookshop in Akure.

• When I was a child, the harmattan wind would blow into Lagos from the Sahara.

• The man was dressed in a wool hat and an old thick coat, presumably to keep out the harmattan wind of Sierra Leone's dry season.

Surface Forms

Etymology