A vast rotating storm that draws energy from warm tropical water and converts it into wind, rain, and the deadliest hazard of all, storm surge — called a hurricane in the Atlantic, a typhoon in the western Pacific, a cyclone in the Indian Ocean. The word traces through Spanish from a Caribbean Indigenous name, linked to the Maya storm god Huracán. The Caribbean and Gulf remain the most hurricane-prone seas on earth; these storms repeatedly reshaped colonial economies, naval history, and migration patterns, and a warming ocean is expected to intensify the strongest of them.
The word came to Spanish from the peoples of the Caribbean. When Spanish sailors reached those waters, they took a local name for the killer storms and wrote it down as huracán. The name belongs to a family of Caribbean Indigenous storm-words, often linked to Taíno and Carib usage and to Huracán, a creator-and-storm deity later known from the Maya Popol Vuh. The people of the Caribbean had lived with these storms for thousands of years, long enough to give the force a face. Europeans knew fierce storms, but they had no word for this tropical cyclone world.