waterspout

Other forms of waterspout

plural

waterspouts·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about waterspout

What does waterspout mean?

waterspout means "a tornado passing over water and picking up a column of water and mist". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in waterspout?

waterspout has 3 syllables: wa-ter-spout. The stress falls on "wa".

What is another word for waterspout?

Close synonyms include downpour, cloudburst, deluge, torrent, pelter. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is waterspout a common word?

waterspout is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.