Gale

How to spell gale

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce gale

What does gale mean?

1. nounA very strong wind, especially one of around 30 to 60 miles per hour.
2. nounA sudden noisy outburst, especially of laughter.

Gale in a sentence

• The overnight gale tore several tiles from the roof.

• His joke set off a gale of laughter across the meeting room.

• Forecasters warned of a severe gale along the coast this weekend.

• A gale of applause followed her closing remarks.

Where does gale come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The origin of gale is genuinely uncertain, which is unusual for such an everyday weather word. It appears in English from the 1540s as a sailors' term for a strong wind, and the most widely accepted guess connects it to Old Norse, where the word gol meant a light breeze and galinn meant 'mad' or 'frantic', as if the wind had lost its temper. Others have linked it to the Danish gal, meaning 'furious' or 'raging', which fits the way the meaning hardened over time from an ordinary wind into a violent one. By the eighteenth century gale had also stretched figuratively to describe a sudden burst of something, as in a gale of laughter sweeping a room. Because the spelling is so plain and regular, the main trap for adults is simply mixing it up with the personal name Gail or with the homophone in 'jail'.

How the word is built

• gale (single root; not built from prefix or suffix)