cloud
/ˈklaʊ̯d/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: 4.46 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Anything reminiscent of a cloud.
noun
noun
A dark spot on a lighter material or background.
noun
An elliptical shape or symbol whose outline is a series of semicircles, supposed to resemble a cloud.
Example Sentences
- "While he thus ſpake, there came a cloud, and ouerſhadowed them, ⁊ they feared, as they entred into the cloude."
- "So this was my future home, I thought![…]Backed by towering hills, the but faintly discernible purple line of the French boundary off to the southwest, a sky of palest Gobelin flecked with fat, fleecy little clouds, it in truth looked a dear little city; the city of one's dreams."
- "Since the mid-1980s, when Indonesia first began to clear its bountiful forests on an industrial scale in favour of lucrative palm-oil plantations, “haze” has become an almost annual occurrence in South-East Asia. The cheapest way to clear logged woodland is to burn it, producing an acrid cloud of foul white smoke that, carried by the wind, can cover hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles."
- "The ship moved forward under a cloud of sail."
- "But in one part of the horizon a cloud lay, and the rulers of India were oppressed with a sense of coming disaster. This cloud had begun to form in 1873, and had been continually growing larger; it threw a shadow over gold-debtor nations, and shed a depressing influence over gold-using countries."
- "He opened the door and was greeted by a cloud of bats."
Etymology
From Middle English cloud, from Old English clūd (“mass of stone, rock, boulder, hill”), from Proto-West Germanic *klūt, from Proto-Germanic *klūtaz, *klutaz (“lump, mass, conglomeration”), from Proto-Indo-European *gel- (“to ball up, clench”). Cognate with Scots clood, clud (“cloud”), Dutch kluit (“lump, mass, clod”), German Low German Kluut, Kluute (“lump, mass, ball”), German Kloß (“lump, ball, dumpling”), Danish klode (“sphere, orb, planet”), Swedish klot (“sphere, orb, ball, globe”), Icelandic klót (“knob on a sword's hilt”). Related to English clod, clot, clump, club. Largely replaced Middle English welkne, from Old English wolcn (whence English welkin), from Proto-Germanic *wulkną, the original Germanic word for cloud (compare Dutch wolk, German Wolke, North Frisian and West Frisian wolk).
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈklaʊ̯d/
- British English: /ˈklaʊ̯d/