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Comment by JohnCClarke | Hacker News Reader

So, the Innuit may not have 100 words for "snow" after all. But the Hacker's Dictionary really does contain 216 synonyms for "broken".

[*] https://hackersdictionary.com/html/index.html

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Boas claimed in 1884 that the Inuit language on Baffin Island had four words for snow. The "100" was inflated through re-telling. And that number has been thoroughly refuted. Of course. Inuit languages don't have 100 different roots for snow. As for "four".. well, English has several too (snow, sleet, slush, firn..), and most other languages from regions where snow exists have a number of such words. Nothing new there.

They have a few.

Aput: Snow on the ground. Qana: Falling snow. Piqsirpoq: Drifting snow. Kaniq: Frost. Kanevvluk: Fine snow. Muruaneq: Soft deep snow. Nutaryuk: Fresh snow. Pirta: Blizzard. Qengaruk: Snow bank.

Not arguing against the idea that the Inuit have many more words for snow. But in english their are many commonly understood equivalents. Even more if you're into the snow sport scene that may reach Inuit levels.

Common words off the top of my head:

Snow on the ground: Snowpack, hardpack, powder, crust, crud, piste

Falling snow: snowing, sleet, blizzard, snowstorm.

Drifting snow: snowdrift.

Frost: frost.

Modern scene lingo Pow, corduroy, granular, chunder, cornice etc

A linguistic sub group of English that literally immerses itself in snow also having many words for snow makes sense.

Just shows the futility of this approach. Yes, you can find words, but do you use them? Is that a filly to you, or is it really just a horse?

An extreme example is the "it's called a zygyzgy of ptarmigans"-type alternative words for flocks of specific birds in English, which are basically made up and unused.

Those grouping words are silly trivia, but if you want to see folks using lots of specialized snow-words casually, just hang out on the skiing subreddit :)

(Well, maybe during the North American skiing season more than in late May.)

If I ski and want to communicate to another skier the weather/piste: Yes

Yes, but the point is, some use them, most don't. The existence of the words means that someone using the language cared enough about the difference to distinguish - but nothing about how few or many they were.

Arguably the existence of niche words could even mean less, as in the flock words example, words that have more or less been invented as pure word games.

To be fair to the Inuit language, they never rode groomers.

Graupel

Don't forget sastrugi.

A climbing partner and I counted over 60 words for snow in (our idiosyncratic) English.

So, I guess there Inuit, English speakers and mountaineers as three different populations.

I think Finnish also has quite many.

Looks like an older version (4.3.0) of The Jargon File page I'm aware of (4.4.7): http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/

That is somehow fitting, given that the 'maintainer' is also thoroughly broken.

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