thunderhead
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English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]thunderhead (plural thunderheads)
- The top portion of a cumulonimbus cloud, which tends to be flattened or fibery in appearance, and may be indicative of thunderstorm activity.
- 1918, Willa Cather, chapter 19, in My Ántonia[1], Boston: Houghton Mifflin, page 158:
- Half the sky was checkered with black thunderheads, but all the west was luminous and clear:
- 1947, Kenneth Roberts, chapter 28, in Lydia Bailey[2], Garden City, NY: Doubleday:
- The wisps of smoke above Léogane became dark and thick, and flowered into a towering thunderhead—an ominous cloud that drifted slowly to the westward and was constantly replenished at its base by uprushes of blacker smoke.
- 2000, Philip Pullman, chapter 29, in The Amber Spyglass[3], New York: Del Rey, page 349:
- The sky ahead was huge with storm: all the whiteness had gone from the thunderheads, and they rolled and swirled with sulphur yellow, sea green, smoke gray, oil black, a queasy churning miles high and as wide as the horizon.