Word of the Day Archive
Tuesday May 22, 2012
cumulus \KYOO-myuh-luhs\
, noun:
1. A heap; pile.
2. A cloud of a class characterized by dense individual elements in the form of puffs, mounds, or towers, with flat bases and tops that often resemble cauliflower.
He was organizing the year's remnants. He was logging and archiving and filing it all. The whole swollen yearlong cumulus.
-- Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia
"So where is it at, Minogue," asks the palatal man, aloft in a cumulus of webs and dust and creak.
-- David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair
Cumulus stems from the Neo-Latin word meaning "heap, pile." It was first used to describe clouds in the early 1800s.
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for cumulus
