Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

updraft

nounC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,385 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: updrafts

An updraft is a current of air rising upward. Caught in an updraft, a strong updraft, ride the updraft.

Birds and gliders both use them to gain height without effort, circling in a column of warm rising air. In a thunderstorm the updraft is what holds hailstones aloft until they are heavy enough to fall.

Griffinstorm · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of updraft

  1. 1nounupdraftA current of air rising upward.C1

    “The hawk hung almost still in the updraft above the cliff.”

updraft is a current.

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *dʰregʰ-

  2. Proto-Germanic

    *drahtuz — a pulling, drawing

  3. Proto-West Germanic

    *drahti

  4. Old English

    *dreaht

  5. Middle English

    draught

  6. English

    draft

  7. English, today

    updraft

Built from

  • draght · Middle English — that which is pulled; that which is drawn up, a design

From up- + draft. draft A phonetic spelling of draught (compare laughter), from Middle English draught, draght (“that which is pulled; that which is drawn up, a design”), from Old English dreaht, dræht, from Proto-West Germanic drahti, drahtu, from Proto-Germanic drahtuz (“a pulling, drawing”). Cognate with Dutch dracht, German Tracht, Icelandic dráttur. by surface analysis, en + draw + t.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

updraft in the wild

  • The solar updraft tower (SUT) is a design concept for a renewable-energy power plant for generating electricity from low-temperature solar heat.

    Solar updraft tower

  • A solar updraft tower power plant can generate electricity from the low temperature atmospheric heat gradient between ground or surface level and structurally reachable altitude.

    Solar updraft tower

  • In meteorology, an updraft (British English: up-draught) is a small-scale current of rising air, often within a cloud.

    Vertical draft

  • Cloud suck is typically associated with an increase in thermal updraft velocity near cloud base.

    Cloud suck

  • The updraft is amplified by this latent heat release.

    Cloud suck

1 / 2

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

the draght family

draft

updraft — used about once every 20,553 pages · #13,385 · point at the bar for the others