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winter

UK/ˈwɪntə/
nounA12 meaningsVery common — you will meet it every day · #1,238 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: winters, wintering, wintered

Winter is the coldest season of the year: dark by four in the afternoon, frost scraped off the windscreen, the heavy coat dug out of the back of the cupboard.

It goes without the in most phrases: in winter, last winter, all through the winter. As an adjective it sits in front of things that belong to the season, like a winter coat, winter tyres, winter sports. Wintry means cold and bleak, and it stretches to people, so a wintry smile is one with no warmth behind it. You can even use winter as a verb: birds winter in Africa, and rich Victorians wintered in Nice. North of the equator winter runs from December to February, south of it from June to August, which surprises people the first time they spend Christmas on a beach.

Ernst Vikne · CC BY-SA 2.0

Definitions of winter

  1. 1nounwinterThe coldest season of the year, between autumn and spring.A1~98%

    “In winter the lake freezes hard enough to walk on.”

    synonyms: wintertime

  2. 2verbspendTo spend the winter in a particular place.B2~2%

    “The swallows winter in West Africa and come back in April.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

winter is a season.

Phrases it lives in

  • the dead of winter — The coldest, darkest middle part of the season.

Where it comes from

Winter has barely changed in a thousand years. Old English winter, from Proto-West Germanic wintru and Proto-Germanic wintruz, and the same shape survives right across the family: Dutch winter, German Winter, Swedish and Danish vinter, Icelandic vetur. Whatever the Germanic speakers called the cold season, we are still calling it that.

  1. Proto-Germanic

    *wintruz — winter

  2. Proto-West Germanic

    *wintru

  3. Old English

    winter

  4. Middle English

    winter

  5. English, today

    winter

From Middle English winter, from Old English winter, from Proto-West Germanic wintru, from Proto-Germanic wintruz (“winter”). Cognate with West Frisian winter (“winter”), Dutch winter (“winter”), German Winter (“winter”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish vinter (“winter”), Faroese and Icelandic vetur (“winter”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Time & Calendar, A Man Called Ove, Weather & Seasons

First appears in chapter 2 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

winter in the wild

  • Different cultures define different dates as the start of winter, and some use a definition based on weather.

    Winter

  • When it is winter in the Northern Hemisphere, it is summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and vice versa.

    Winter

  • The Winter Olympics are usually held in February, during the winter season of the Northern Hemisphere.

    Winter Olympic Games

  • Other names are the "extreme of winter", the "shortest day" and the "longest night".

    Winter solstice

  • Since then, summer and winter games have usually celebrated a four-year period known as an Olympiad.

    List of Olympic Games host cities

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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.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.