Honestly I’ve always said “spring summer fall winter” without thinking where those names came from. One rainy Tuesday I’m staring out the window watching leaves fall and suddenly wonder – who even named seasons? Grabbed my laptop thinking it’d be simple.
My total wrong first guess
Figured Latin people made these up cause so many English words come from there. Opened like five tabs trying to match “summer” to Latin roots. Wasted half an hour reading Roman farm calendars. Dead end – turns out “summer” actually came from old Germanic folks saying “sumer”. Felt kinda stupid.
Library trip mess
Next morning hauled myself to the public library. Dusty etymology books were falling apart in my hands. Three things shocked me:
- “Winter” is super dark – comes from old words meaning “wet” OR “dark time”. Basically just complaining about weather.
- “Autumn” confused everyone – Romans used it first but English borrowed it from French nobles centuries later.
- “Spring” wasn’t always a season! Originally meant plants “springing up”. People only started calling it a season around the 1500s.
Left with ink smudges on my fingers and zero coffee.
Big Asian surprise
Got curious how other places handle seasons. Asked my Japanese neighbor – turns out they traditionally sliced the year into 24 freaking micro-seasons based on nature clues! There’s literally a season called “first frog croaks”. Meanwhile Indians split the year into SIX seasons based on monsoon patterns.
Suddenly realized – Europeans were lazy just naming four basic weather patterns!
Cold open confession
Here’s the kicker – spent weeks on this and my original blog post draft sounded like a textbook. Total snoozefest. So I trashed it and wrote this instead sitting at my kitchen counter with cold pizza. The real discovery? Season names are accidental poetry made by freezing cavemen, sunburnt farmers and fancy French aristocrats messing it all up together.
Kinda love how random human history is sometimes.
