diablo wind
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.27 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
3
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "[…]a Diablo Wind. A Diablo was responsible for the great Oakland-Berkeley fire of 1991. Earlier in this century Mill Valley in Marin County and Berkeley lost whole neighborhoods to northeaster fires. The winds are short in duration […]"
- "[…]Diablo winds, which are the local name for a wind technically known as a foehn - a hot dry wind coming down off a mountain range, rising in temperature as it descends (adiabatic compression). On September 17, 1922, a Diablo wind condition existed and a fire began about 2 pm in wildlands in the hills above the City.[…]"
- "Northern CA has the Diablo wind, a hot, dry NE wind that sweeps down the hills east of SF through the canyons of the Diablo Range, […]. [A fire was] caused mainly by a Diablo wind - charred the Oakland and Berkeley Hills east of San Francisco on September 17, 1923. High winds blew catastrophic fires into the northeast section of Berkeley. Within three hours fire had consumed 577 homes. This fire[…]"
- "[…]a Diablo wind drove flames through the Berkeley Hills and into the campus of the University of California. Some 3,100 acres and 584 houses burned. Ten years later a Diablo-driven fire scorched a thousand acres and five homes. In 1946[…]"
Etymology
So called because in the San Francisco Bay area the wind blows from the direction of Mount Diablo and the Diablo Range, which ultimately gets its name from Spanish diablo (“devil”), the hot and fiery connotations of which may have reinforced the use of the name for hot, firestorm-causing winds.