Did you know that the words Hurricane and Typhoon are derived
from storm and wind gods, and the chinese name for "great wind" ?
Spanish explorers brought the word "huracan" or "furacan" back with
them from the New World; with 39 different spellings listed in
the Oxford English Dictionary, it's a word as mutable as what it
describes. The difference between a hurricane, a cyclone, and a
typhoon seems to be largely a matter of where it takes place. The
word "typhoon" is roughly contemporaneous with "hurricane," but the
Venentian merchant Caesar Frederick was talking about storms in
the East Indies. It's anybody's guess whether he was trying to
say tai fung, the Cantonese word for cyclonic storms in the China
Sea, or tufan, the Persian, Arabic, and Hindi term for the same
thing.
http://www.namedevelopment.com/blog/archives/2005/09/Wikipedia says: The word hurricane is derived from the name of a
native Caribbean Amerindian storm god, Huracan, via Spanish huracan.
For the word typhoon two possibilities arise:
* From the Chinese "daaih fung" (Cantonese); "da feng" (Mandarin)
which means "great wind".
* From Urdu, Persian or Arabic tufan (in Greek mythology,
Typhon was a son of Gaia and the god of dangerous winds,
from greek "typhein" to smoke).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhon
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