You can feel compassion for the victim of discrimination or the victim of typhoon Haiyan or for a drug addict.
Yet he now finds himself mired in a political swamp as unforgiving as the Mekong Delta in typhoon season.
typhoon fighter jets will patrol the skies, and Puma helicopters will be at the ready with airborne snipers.
The deputy mayor defended his government from accusations that it did not do more to prepare its people for typhoon Haiyan.
The men stayed behind in Candahug while the women escaped to higher ground when typhoon Haiyan moved in.
He made a voyage across the sea, and was carried away by a typhoon.
“We shall have a typhoon—a precious hard one too, I suspect,” he answered.
A tropical storm, not a typhoon, but a belated burst of the periodic rains, deluged the island before midnight.
It may be that there are some persons in Britain who do not know precisely what a typhoon is.
Although disabled, she fought gallantly against the typhoon.
Tiphon "violent storm, whirlwind, tornado," 1550s, from Greek typhon "whirlwind," personified as a giant, father of the winds, perhaps from typhein "to smoke" (cf. typhus). The meaning "cyclone, violent hurricane of India or the China Seas" (1580s) is first recorded in T. Hickock's translation of an account in Italian of a voyage to the East Indies by Caesar Frederick, a merchant of Venice:
concerning which Touffon ye are to vnderstand, that in the East Indies often times, there are not stormes as in other countreys; but euery 10. or 12. yeeres there are such tempests and stormes, that it is a thing incredible, but to those that haue seene it, neither do they know certainly what yeere they wil come. ["The voyage and trauell of M. Caesar Fredericke, Marchant of Venice, into the East India, and beyond the Indies"]This sense of the word, in reference to titanic storms in the East Indies, first appears in Europe in Portuguese in the mid-16th century. It aparently is from tufan, a word in Arabic, Persian, and Hindi meaning "big cyclonic storm." Yule ["Hobson-Jobson," London, 1903] writes that "the probability is that Vasco [da Gama] and his followers got the tufao ... direct from the Arab pilots." The Arabic word sometimes is said to be from Greek typhon, but other sources consider it purely Semitic, though the Greek word might have influenced the form of the word in English. Al-tufan occurs several times in the Koran for "a flood or storm" and also for Noah's Flood. Chinese (Cantonese) tai fung "a great wind" also might have influenced the form or sense of the word in English, and that term and the Indian one may have had some mutual influence; toofan still means "big storm" in India.
typhoon n') A violent cyclonic storm occurring in the western Pacific Ocean. See Note at cyclone. |
In meteorology, a type of cyclone occurring in the western regions of the Pacific Ocean.
Note: A typhoon is similar to a hurricane in levels of destructiveness.
