cloud-compeller

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   poetic: a cloud-gatherer; an epithet for Zeus or Jove

   The translator invokes Zeus as the cloud-compeller before the storm begins.

2. 2
   noun

   figurative: a person or thing imagined as gathering, driving, or commanding clouds

   Thoreau pictures the smoke-breathing locomotive as a traveling cloud-compeller.

A compound of cloud and compeller, used as an English rendering of Greek nephelegereta, 'cloud-gatherer,' a recurrent Homeric epithet of Zeus. English dictionaries record the poetic mythological sense; later writers extend it humorously or metaphorically to smokers, engines, and other seeming makers of clouds.

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