nubilous — cloudy or foggy or misty; essentially something obscure
nublado — the Spanish cognate that means “cloudy”
“Nubilous” popped up on my phone yesterday because I subscribe to the word of the day from dictionary.com. When it did, my mouth literally gaped open.
I taught Spanish for 30 years and never knew this word existed!
I taught vocabulary for weather expressions over and over and over for all those years and saw how students struggled to equate the word “nublado” with the English word “cloudy” because there isn’t any sort of easy correlation between those words.
Oh, but clearly there is! In fact, there’s a perfectly obvious correlation between the word “nubilous” and “nublado!”
Ugh. I was so disgusted with myself for not having any prior knowledge of the word “nubilous” until yesterday that I wanted to save any of you who are reading this right now from that same disgust — unless you happen to know the word “nubilous” already, and if you do, I’m both very happy for you and very jealous of you in an annoyed-with-myself fashion.
“Nubilous” and “nublado” both come from the Latin word of nubes which means “clouds.” “Nubes” is also the Spanish word for “clouds,” and I’ve known and taught that word for years, too, but our words of “clouds” and “cloudy” come to us from Old English. Thus, the reason there isn’t any easy correlation between “nublado” and “cloudy” for students of the Spanish language to pick up on.
However, if I’d known the word “nubilous” for all those years, I would have also been teaching my kids that word in order to help the word “nublado” click in their heads. Other weather words like “sol” for “sun” and “frío” for “cold” were easy for them to associate with our words of “solar” and “frigid” or “freezing,” but “nublado” always gave them a struggle.
It only I’d known the word “nubilous.” It’s not in my hardback copy of Random House’s dictionary because it’s not a commonly used English word, so I don’t feel too horrible for not knowing the word prior to yesterday because I started teaching back when any reference I needed to do was still done using physical copies of books. Once I’d established my base for teaching weather-related vocabulary all those years ago, I didn’t need to vary it much and I never thought to look online later for a cognate for “cloudy,” so I won’t beat myself up too much about it.
Now that I know of the word “nubilous” though, I didn’t want to waste anytime in telling you about it. As fate would have it, too, it is very cloudy out right now.
It’s a cloudy day. Es un día nublado.
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Tammy Marshall
Nubilous