monsoon

UK/mɒnˈsuːn/US/mɑnˈsuːn/

nounB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,183 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: monsoons

The monsoon is the season of heavy rain in southern Asia. The monsoon season, before the monsoon, a failed monsoon.

It is properly a reversal of wind rather than rain itself: the land heats faster than the sea, the wind turns, and the rain follows. A weak monsoon means a failed harvest for hundreds of millions, so its arrival is national news in India.

Definitions of monsoon

1nounmonsoonThe season of heavy rain in southern Asia.B1+
“During the monsoon, heavy rain floods the streets of the city almost every day.”

monsoon is a season.

Where it comes from

Arabic mawsim meant a season, and reached English through Portuguese moncao and Dutch moesson.

Arabic
مَوْسِم — season
Dutch
moesson
Portuguese
monção
English, today
monsoon

Built from

وَسَمَ · Arabic — to mark, to brand

Portuguese monção and Dutch moesson, from Arabic مَوْسِم (“season”), from وَسَمَ (“to mark, to brand”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Nature & Weather

Practise this word

monsoon in the wild

Usually, the term monsoon is used to refer to the rainy phase of a seasonally changing pattern, although technically there is a dry phase.
Monsoon
There are normally only two seasons in tropical climates, a wet (rainy/monsoon) season and a dry season.
Tropical climate
Large-scale thermal lows over continents help drive monsoon circulations.
Low-pressure area
When this occurs over the tropics in concert with the Intertropical Convergence Zone, it is known as a monsoon trough.
Low-pressure area
The wet season (sometimes called the rainy season or monsoon season) is the time of year when most of a region's average annual rainfall occurs.
Wet season

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

monsoon season

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