climate

climate
\ \ [14] The notion underlying climate is of ‘sloping’ or ‘leaning’. It comes, via Old French climat or late Latin clīma (whence English clime [16]), from Greek klīmasloping surface of the earth’, which came ultimately from the same source (the Indo-European base *kli-) as produced English lean. Greek geographers assigned the earth’s surface to various zones according to the angle which their ‘slope’ made with the rays of the sun (originally there were seven of these, ranging from 17 degrees of latitude North to 48 degrees, but later the system was elaborated so that each hemisphere was divided into 24 bands or ‘climates’ of latitude).
\ \ This was the sense in which the word passed into Latin, where it broadened out into simply ‘region’, and hence ‘weather associated with a particular area’.
\ \ Cf.LADDER, LEAN

Word origins - 2ed. . 2005.

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