Percy Bysshe Shelley, the romantic poet, described clouds as the daughters of Earth and Water and the nurslings of the Sky. The word cloud comes from Old English, and from a most unpoetic source, originally meaning a lump of rock. It’s brother, clod, means a lump of soil and its cousin, clot, a lump in a liquid.

So how did our light and airy cloud manage to escape it’s family of clods and clots? The probable explanation is that large, dense cumulus clouds were thought to resemble lumps of rock so took the name, cloud, and the lumps of rock were left being called lumps of rock.

Meteorologists have named clouds in a very ordered and logical way as you might expect. The main types of cloud have good scientific names chosen from solid Latin roots:

Alto – high cloud – from Italian for high and from Latin Altus;

Cirrus – thin, wispy cloud – from Latin for curl, fringe;

Cumulus – tall, fluffy cloud – from Latin for a heap or pile;

Nimbus – rain-bearing cloud – from Latin for raincloud; and

Stratus – a broad flat cloud – from Latin for spread out.

These basic cloud types can be combined to describe in-between types, for instance, a cumulonimbus is a cumulus cloud bearing rain or a cirrostratus is thin and wispy and spread out.

However, there appears to be some mischievous meteorologists out there who find this all far too dull. Watch out for mammatocumulus or breast clouds (from Latin mamma for breast or udder); tuba clouds that look like trumpets hanging from cumulus clouds; and scud clouds that shoot along under storms (scud, related to scuttle, means to move quickly and perhaps comes from the Middle English scut meaning to race like a hare).

You can only think that Shelley would have been proud of them.