Typhoon

How to spell typhoon

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce typhoon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does typhoon mean?

1. nounA violent tropical storm or cyclone occurring in the western Pacific or Indian Ocean.

Typhoon in a sentence

• The typhoon flooded coastal villages and shut down the ferry service for days.

• Forecasters tracked the approaching typhoon and ordered an evacuation of the harbour town.

Where does typhoon come from?

Language of origin: Other

Typhoon has one of the most tangled pedigrees in English, drawing on at least three unrelated language families that happened to produce similar-sounding words for a violent storm. From Arabic, Persian, and Urdu came tufan, meaning a great storm or flood, which English sailors picked up in the Indian Ocean and which appears in early forms such as 'touffon'. Quite separately, the Chinese term for these Pacific storms, written as 'big wind' and pronounced roughly tai fung in Cantonese, fed the modern sense and the final shape of the word. Sitting over both was the Greek Typhon, the name of a monstrous storm-giant and the source of words like 'typhus', and its presence is exactly why the storm came to be spelled with a Greek-looking 'ph' rather than a plain 'f'. The various strands had largely merged by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into the single word we use for a tropical cyclone of the western Pacific. The spelling trap, that /f/ sound written 'ph', is therefore a genuine fossil of the Greek connection.

How the word is built

• Unsegmented borrowing; the 'ph' spelling for the /f/ sound reflects Greek influence on the word's history rather than any separable prefix or suffix.