[f. Gr. κύκλος circle (or κυκλῶν moving in a circle, whirling round): see quot. 1848.
Piddington’s account of his formation of the word is vague; the sense he assigns suggests that the Gr. word he meant was κύκλωμα, which means inter alia ‘the coil of a serpent’; hence cyclome occurs as an early variant.]
1. gen. A name introduced in 1848 by H. Piddington, as a general term for all storms or atmospheric disturbances in which the wind has a circular or whirling course.
1848. H. Paddington, Sailor’s Horn-bk., 8. Winds. Class II. (Hurricane Storms … Whirlwinds … African Tornado … Water Spouts … Samiel, Simoom), I suggest … that we might, for all this last class of circular or highly curved winds, adopt the term ‘Cyclone’ from the Greek κυκλως (which signifies amongst other things the coil of a snake) as … expressing sufficiently the tendency to circular motion in these meteors. Ibid., 176. Throughout the preceding parts the word Cyclone has been, as proposed … added after the words in common use to express circular-blowing winds. In this part I propose to use it alone.
b. spec. A hurricane or tornado of limited diameter and destructive violence.
1856. Kane, Arct. Expl., II. xxii. 220. One of the most fearful gales I have ever experienced. It had the character and the force of a cyclome [sic].
1857. S. P. Hall, in Merc. Marine Mag. (1858), V. 10. This season has been … prolific in typhoons or cyclones.
1893. Daily News, 27 May, 6/8. A severe cyclone has been raging for the last three days at the head of the Bay of Bengal.
c. Meteorol. A system of winds rotating around a center of minimum barometric pressure, the center and whole system having itself also a motion of translation, which is sometimes arrested, when the cyclone becomes for a time stationary. Cf. ANTICYCLONE. (Such a system often extends over many thousands of square miles.)
As to the differences between this and b, see A. Buchan, in Encycl. Brit., XVI. 129.
1875. A. Buchan, in Encycl. Brit., III. 33. Areas of low pressure or Cyclones…. A cyclone which passed over northwestern Europe on the morning of 2d November, 1863.
1881. R. H. Scott, in Gd. Words, July, 454. Barometrical depressions or cyclones.
1887. Daily News, 13 Oct., 5/1. There was … a twofold reason for northerly winds—the anti-cyclone off the west of Ireland and the cyclone over the flats of Holland.
d. transf. Applied to a violent rotatory storm in the sun’s atmosphere.
1867. Lockyer, Guillemin’s Heavens (ed. 2), 53. Immense cyclones pass over the surface of the Sun with fearful rapidity, as is rendered evident by the form and changes of certain spots.
2. Comb. cyclone-pit, ‘on the prairies and plains of the western United States, a pit or underground room made for refuge from a tornado or cyclone’ (Cent. Dict.).
