Yesterday at the Oxford University Press blog I revisited the word hurricane and mentioned a few other words for circular storms; cyclone, tornado and typhoon.

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I didn’t get much into the etymology of typhoon but it’s one of those rare words that blew in from two places with similar enough meanings that one word came to apply in both cases.

The American Heritage Dictionary declares with authority that the word started its life in Greece as Typhon the name of a hundred-headed fire breathing giant who was father of the wind.

John Ayto’s Word Origins says with equal certainty that typhoon arose in Cantonese from two words daai feng meaning “great wind.”

Both acknowledge the influence of the alternate source but The Oxford English Dictionary takes a middle road saying that both of these were influential at different times.

The word appears in Urdu and this is thought to have evolved into Arabic and Persian words for these gigantic storms. But the English Language didn’t come to absorb this word until Arabic speakers had brought it to India and an Italian by the name of Cesare Federici had set it to paper in Italian during a commercial voyage there.

His account was translated into English in 1588 by one Thomas Hickock who in his title refers to the original author as a “merchant of Venice.”

This was decade before William Shakespeare wrote his play The Merchant of Venice.

I’m not suggesting there is any more link here than the mercantile fame of Venetians at the time.

The upshot is that a word with potentially Greek roots made its way across the Mideast to the Indian subcontinent before finding its way into English.

It was 100 years later that English travelers then applied this name of the storm to similar meteorological phenomenon in the Far East.

It only becomes clear that the Cantonese word was also an influence 100 years again after that.

That middle reference just before 1700 was made in a book by William Dampier. He was a buccaneer, which is a polite way of saying pirate.

He eventually sailed three times around the world but his rise to fame came because as a relatively junior pirate he kept notes, and after his first big voyage published a book.

Who knows if his fellow buccaneers or his captains knew more than he did, but because he was the author, he was seen as the authority and the admiralty commissioned him to take command of a second expedition.

Being a pirate he perhaps wasn’t the most kind or gentle of souls and when he returned to England he was stripped of his command, docked pay and thrown out of the navy for cruelty.  This at a time when hanging crew members for insubordination was still okay for a captain.

Luckily for Dampier soon after that England was preparing for war with Spain and France and pirates were needed…oh, I mean privateers were needed to help in the stormy international relations.