Hurricanes???

Question

This is just a question that need some opinions. Being a person who lives in Florida, we are known to get horrible storms called hurricanes each summer. But, why are they called hurricanes? When the storm comes, they name it right? But not always is it a girls name, but sometimes a guys. So, how can it be a hurricane? Should'nt it be hurricanes and himmacanes? Himmacane George and Hurricane Joan.

Answer 1

They call it Hurricanes because it first originated in Haati, Cuba, and Puerto Rico where they called the storms huraca'n which means "center of the wind." Hura is "wind" and ca'n means "center." Columbus's expeditions captured huraca'n and made it a Spanish word; it found its way from Spanish to English as early as 1555.

They used to name the hurricans after women in 1953. Then 1979 the lists alternate between male and female. They only change the name of the hurricane so that they can identify storms and track them as they move across the ocean.

Answer 2

A hurricane is not a person, therefore it has no gender; the only reason why people "name" hurricanes is to identify them as a kind of hobby. F.Y.I. there is a list for named storms for the north atlantic every year, this list repeats itself every 6 years, unless there is a storm of exceptional magnitude, in which case the name is retired and is never used again-one example is Hurricane Katrina for all the devastation that that storm had caused.

Answer 3

The first person to name tropical revolving storms (called hurricanes, typhoons or tropical cyclones depending on where you are), was a Scotsman named Clement Wragge who was the Queensland Government Meteorologist at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The practice died with Wragge to be started again after WWII. Wragge named his storms after Greek gods and goddesses and named the occasional one after politicians he didn't like. When the naming started again, the storms were all named after women.

In 1974, the Prime Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, told the Bureau of Meteorology that all tropical cyclone names had to alternate between male and female. The Bureau informed the World Meteorological Organisation and by 1979 it was standard practice throughout the world.