Other forms: clouds, clouded, clouding
A cloud is the white or grey mass floating in the sky, and rain is what falls out of it. Thin streaks over a blue morning, a flat grey lid across the whole city, the tall piled ones that mean a storm by evening.
Cloud is not only weather. Your files live in the cloud, which means on somebody else's computers in a building you will never see — and things are kept in the cloud, never on it. Any mass hanging in the air takes the word: a cloud of dust behind a truck, a cloud of smoke, a cloud of flies over the bins. As a verb it means to make unclear — steam clouds a mirror, anger clouds your judgement. And the phrases run deep: on cloud nine, under a cloud, head in the clouds.
1nouncloudA white or grey mass of water floating in the sky.~38%
“The clouds came in from the west and the beach emptied.”
2nounstorageThe distant computers where files and photos are stored online.~45%
“All the photos are backed up to the cloud.”
3noundustA mass of dust, smoke or insects hanging in the air.~14%
“A cloud of dust rose behind the truck.”
4verbhardTo make something hard to see through or hard to think about.~3%
“Steam clouded the bathroom mirror.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 158 sentences found in the wild and placed 117 of them on a sense (41 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Old English clūd meant a lump of rock — a boulder, a hill. Somebody looked up, saw the same heaped shape in the sky, and the word moved house. It is family with clod, clot and clump, all of them lumps, and behind those an ancient root meaning to ball up. The older English word for the thing, welkin, lost the argument and went out of use.
Proto-Indo-European
*gel- — to ball up, clench
Proto-Germanic
*klūtaz
Proto-West Germanic
*klūt
Old English
clūd — mass of stone, rock, boulder, hill
Middle English
cloud
English, today
cloud
Built from
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 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 welkne, from wolcn (whence welkin), from wulkną, the original Germanic word for cloud (compare Dutch wolk, German Wolke, frr and West Frisian wolk*).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA