Talk:Junuary

Junuary and Juneuary

The spelling Juneuary is older than Junuary. Junuary for cool, dark, wet Junes, seems to have been adopted in the northwest USA and southwestern BC, Canada, especially Vancouver Island, in 2008 (though there is an earlier use of Juneuary for the same phenomenon).

The word has two uses. The older use is for a warm period in January and seems to have come from the northeastern USA.

• Juneuary (for warm January)
  1. 1989, "Area enjoys 'Springtime' in mid-winter", "The Dispatch" (Lexingtion, North Carolina), 1989-02-01, Page 1

     The warm month of January has threatened grain crops, fruit orchards and flowers, according to an agricultural spokesman, with one' Charlotte radio stations calling last month 'Juneuary'.

  2. 2000, "", Rural Futures (New York State Legislative Commission on Rural Resources), 2000, P. 16

     unseasonably mild ('Juneuary?')

  3. 2008, "The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins", P. 466

     Juneuary. A warm or mild January. Also spelled Junuary.

  4. 2008, "Getting a Chill from the Almanac", "Sun Journal (Lewiston, Maine, USA)", 2008-08-28 P. A8

     In 1995, the Almanc nailed a surprise January heat wave -- crhistened `Juneuary' -- in the Northeast.

Ecwiebe (talk) 16:22, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for doing this research! I found more cites of the "warm January" sense dating back to 1922. I suspect the "warm January" sense has been coined independently multiple times over the years. Whereas the "wet June" sense seems to have emerged in Pacific Northwest English to describe regional climate conditions. (There's a couple isolated uses from Newfoundland in the mid-2010s.) The "wet June" sense may have a longer history, but it's harder to find examples of it being used in print, since most Google Books and Internet Archive hits are scannos of "January." WordyAndNerdy (talk) 07:53, 5 July 2024 (UTC)