upwind

UK/ʌpˈwɪnd/US/ʌpˈwɪnd/

adverbC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,650 of 15,258neutral

Upwind means into the wind, or on the side it blows from. Sail upwind, stay upwind, upwind of the fire.

Staying upwind is the standing advice near smoke, gas or fire, and it is why hunters approach that way — your scent goes downwind. A sailing boat cannot go straight upwind and must tack across it. Note downwind, its opposite; and that the compound is simply up plus wind.

Definitions of upwind

1adverbupwindInto the wind, or on the side it blows from.C1
“The deer smelled the hunters because they were standing upwind.”

upwind is a direction.

Also accepted in games: windward

Where it comes from

Middle English
wynd
English
wind
English, today
upwind

Built from

*h₂wéh₁n̥ts · Proto-Indo-European — wind
*h₂weh₁- · Proto-Indo-European — to blow

From up- + wind. wind comes from Middle English wynd. From Middle English wynd,wind, from Old English wind (“wind”), from Proto-West Germanic wind, from Proto-Germanic windaz, from Proto-Indo-European h₂wéh₁n̥tos (“wind”), from earlier h₂wéh₁n̥ts (“wind”), derived from the present participle of h₂weh₁- (“to blow”). 2

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

upwind in the wild

An upwind vessel is able to manoeuvre at will toward any downwind point, since the relative wind then moves aft.
Weather gage
Sailing upwind involves frequent changes of sail: more tiring for the crew, more chance for mishap, and more taxing for the helm.
Weather gage
"To stay" is also a verb: to bring the ship's head up to the wind (to point the bow upwind).
Stays (nautical)
By picking the mark that was most upwind, the start could always be made upwind.
Sailing at the 1948 Summer Olympics
Historically, the origin of upwind methods can be traced back to the work of Courant, Isaacson, and Rees who proposed the CIR method.
Upwind scheme

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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.

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