storm-cloud

A form of storm cloud — A dark and ominous cloud that appears to indicate a coming storm.

Meanings

nounstorm-cloud (plural storm-clouds)

plural storm-clouds

  1. datedDated form of storm cloud.

    IN midwinter the shadow that hung over John gathered into storm-cloud.

    1913, William J[ohn] Locke, chapter XIV, in Stella Maris, London: John Lane, The Bodley Head; […], →OCLC, page 184
    3 more examples

    ’TIS midnight now—athwart the murky air, / Dank lurid meteors shoot a livid gleam; / From the dark storm-clouds flashes a fearful glare, / It shews the bending oak, the roaring stream.

    1810, Margaret Nicholson, edited by John Fitzvictor [pseudonyms; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Thomas Jefferson Hogg], “Fragment. Supposed to Be an Epithalamium of Francis Ravaillac and Charlotte Cordé.”, in Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson; Being Poems Found amongst the Papers of That Noted Female Who Attempted the Life of the King in 1786, Oxford, Oxfordshire: J[ohn] Munday, →OCLC, page 11

    O Isla’s maid, yon sea-bird mark, / Her white wing gleams through mist and spray, / Against the storm-cloud, lowering dark, / As to the rock she wheels away;— / Where clouds are dark and billows rave, / Why to the shelter should she come / Of cliff exposed to wind and wave?— / O maid of Isla, ’tis her home.

    1820, Walter Scott, “The Maid of Isla”, in Miscellaneous Poems, Edinburgh: […] Archibald Constable and Co. […] and Hurst, Robinson, and Co. […], →OCLC, pages 113–114

    The dreariest towns I ever beheld—the tops of the islands in gloomy storm-clouds; […]

    1881 May 31, John Muir, “Siberian Adventures”, in William Frederic Badè, editor, The Cruise of the Corwin: Journal of the Arctic Expedition in 1881 in Search of De Long and the Jeannette, Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin Company; Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, published 1917, →OCLC, pages 36–37
Cite this entry
APA

storm-cloud. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/storm-cloud

MLA

“storm-cloud.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/storm-cloud. Accessed November 3, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “storm-cloud,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/storm-cloud.

Source: storm-cloud on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.