winter: [OE] Winter is a general Germanic word (German and Dutch spell it the same, Swedish and Danish have vinter). Its prehistoric ancestor was *wentrus, but the ultimate source of this is uncertain. It could well go back to a nasalized version of the Indo-European base *wed-, *wod-, *ud- ‘wet’ (source also of English otter, water and wet), in which case winter would be etymologically the ‘wet’ season. But an alternative theory traces it back to Indo- European *wind- ‘white’ (source of Breton gwenn, Welsh gwyn – which may underlie English penguin – and Irish fionn ‘white’), in which case it would denote the ‘white’ season.
