A BLIZZARD, as we all know very well, is an unpleasant combination of snow and strong winds. The word is thought to be American and to date, in its present meaning, from the second half of the last century. Other than that, however, its origins are from clear and its etymology has at times given rise to chauvinistic rivalry.
We first find the term explained in 1870 in a respected publication, the Northern Vindicator, an erstwhile organ of Esterville, Iowa.
Many of the early settlers in Iowa came from Germany, it seems, and when they experienced the severe winter storms on the Great Plains, they would exclaim: "Der Sturm kommt blitzartig." The transition from blitzartig to blizzard was, the paper said, a natural progression in linguistics.
At that time, however, no one outside Iowa had ever heard of "blizzards". The term only came into widespread use in the United States when what is now remembered as the Great Blizzard of 1888 brought the eastern seaboard to a standstill on March 12th.
New Yorkers, however, were slow to give credit to the Iowa Germans. They preferred to recall that back in the 1820s, a blizzard in the old wild west vocabulary meant a whiff of gunshot. Davy Crockett, they assured us, used the word this way when he took "a blizzard" at some buffalo.
A few days later, that same storm of 1888 moved across the Atlantic to hit Britain on March 18th - where it was still referred to as a "blizzard".
Having dismissed as frivolous the explanation that such a storm was named after a Blizzard family of Buckinghamshire who had emigrated to America some years previously, the Times declared that the word had its source in an expression of the English midlands: "Well, I be blizzered", apparently, was a common pronouncement by persons amazed by some item of very startling news.
This was enough to prompt another blizzard, more of the Davy Crockett sort, from the other side of the Atlantic. "Nonsense!" said the New York Times, responding to the Thunderer and, in its haste, forgetting about the hero of the Alamo. "The word is simply a bit of onomatopoeia. Like the hoof beats in Virgil's poetry, the word is supposed to sound more or less like the thing it denotes."
By March 19th, the now famous blizzard had moved on across the Channel to the Continent and the German papers had to have their pfennig's worth. Naturally, they were inclined to favour Iowa and proclaimed that the word was definitely from the German blitz.