THE longest word in Shakespeare is in Act V of Love's Labour's Lost. It occurs when Costard says to Moth: "I marvel thy master has not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not; so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus." The observation is a little hard to fathom, unless you accept the assertion of a staunch supporter of Francis Bacon as the real writer of Shakespeare's plays, who believed that the word in question was an anagram of Hi ludi, F. Bacon is nati, tuiti orbi: "These plays, born of Francis Bacon, are preserved for the world." Full marks, I suppose, for ingenuity, but few for credibility.
Meteorologists, too, have a penchant for long words. As their calling began to develop into a science in the 18th and 19th centuries, its practitioners collectively seemed to form the singular view that their meaning would be clearer if all the terms they used were Greek and rather long. The nomenclature they chose for instruments may illustrate the point.
Most have names which end with the Greek suffixes - graph or meter. The former indicates that the instrument provides a permanent record on paper of the element being observed literally a "graph" - and it comes from the Greek word grapho meaning "write". Instruments of the latter kind merely measure the element concerned, and the observer himself must grapho down the value; the ending comes from the Greek word metron, meaning measure".
With these two suffixes and a few Greek roots, a wide vocabulary can be assembled. A thermograph, for instance - from the Greek word thermos meaning "hot" - provides a continuous record of the temperature; and as we all know, a thermometer allows you to read its instantaneous value. The Greek word for "wet" is hugros - so a hygrometer measures the humidity, and a hygrograph records it. There are also barometers and anemometers, and their graphical equivalents, which are concerned respectively with pressure (from baros meaning weight") and wind (from anemos which, ingenuously, means "wind").
Of course there are many mavericks in our weather lexicon. The word for "hurricane", for example, is from the Spanish huracan, and the Spaniards also lent their word for thunderstorms - tronada - to provide us with "tornado". The word "front" had its origins in the military activity of the first World War, and most of the more common weather terms are simple Anglo Saxon words with the four traditional letters: "rain", "hail" and "snow", for example, all come straight from Old English - as indeed does the word "weather" itself.