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💨 A southwest wind 👒 A rain hat
sou'wester

sou'wester

9.1
A strong wind that blows from the southwest
  • noun
  • /ˌsaʊˈwɛstər/
  • UK
translation icon : viento del suroeste
  • We were caught in a sou'wester while walking along the coast, making it difficult to see.

Examples

  • The sailor adjusted his sails as a strong sou'wester picked up, threatening to capsize the boat.

  • Coming up the straits, a sou'wester blew up and landed us on a mud bank.

    Monsieur Verdoux (1947)

  • As the sou'wester howled through the trees, we decided to stay indoors for the day.

Synonyms

southwester
vssou'wester
7.4

A strong wind that blows from the southwest

is written with an apostrophe as a dialectal variant
afer
vssou'wester
  • Archaic
9.9

An old word for a southwest wind

is the modern common term used today instead

Surface Forms

sou'wester singular
sou'westers plural

Morphology

sou'wester = southwest (transparent) = south + west + er

The word is transparently built from southwest plus the noun-forming wind suffix -er, and the apostrophe spelling is only a reduced orthographic form.

Etymology

Sou'wester comes from south and west, which together mean 'the direction between south and west', so a sou'wester is a strong wind that blows from the southwest.