Where does the word "hurricane" come from?

Hurricane is one of the first words English borrowed from the Americas, and it arrived without a settled spelling.

The source is a language of the Caribbean. Etymonline traces it to an Arawakan word of the West Indies, by way of Spanish huracán and furacán. Merriam-Webster names Taíno, the Arawakan language of the Greater Antilles, as the donor. The Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés used the word in writing in 1547-9, and Pedro Mártir de Anghiera used it too.

English got it from Spanish soon after. Richard Eden's Decades of the New World gave the first English use, "furacanes," for storms the Greeks had called Tiphones. Merriam-Webster dates the noun to 1555.

Then came the spelling chaos. The Oxford English Dictionary records 39 spellings, mostly from the late 1500s, including forcane, herrycano, harrycain and hurlecane. The Spanish of the period often confused initial f and h, which explains the furacán forms. The modern spelling became common from about 1650 and was fixed after 1688. Shakespeare wrote hurricano in King Lear, but he meant waterspouts, not the storm.

What the word meant before Spain is less certain. NOAA says the Taíno worshiped a storm god named Juracán and that the name may have come from Huracan, a Maya wind god. An etymology blog, Etymology Nerd, calls a link between the Arawakan and Mayan words a hypothesis with no written records behind it, and notes a similar storm-god word in Quechua. So the storm-god connection is widely repeated, and a Maya link is possible, but neither is proven.

Two relatives show how English sorted its storm words. Typhoon, for storms of India and the China Seas, is recorded from 1588. Cyclone was coined much later, in 1848, by the East India Company official Henry Piddington. By 1894 hurricane was also an adjective, as in the hurricane lamp.