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Ha, good finds :P

Funny -

“Wintery Mix” is the term ski mountains use when they receive rain mixed in with snow / or turning to snow. No ski industry marketing person ever wants to use the term “rain” in any snow report as it’s a guarantee for losing customers.

I’ve also seen other words that they substitute in lieu of rain, “scrappy stuff”, “crud”, “precip” and the awesome sounding “funk”.

The mystery deepens http://www.wunderground.com/US/NY/New_York

26° F | 14° F Ice Pellets 100% chance of precipitation

Ice Pellets?

a mix is exactly what we got. every time I looked outside it had switched from snow to freezing rain or back again. getting the car out today was a project, I still have some numbness in my fingers…

A sunny 70 degrees here in Los Angeles today!

Isn’t a “wintry mix” just called “sleet”? I mean, isn’t that why that word exists?

English is not my native tongue but the word “sleet” I know all too well since it’s pretty much all we get each winter here in Denmark. Actual snow is cause for celebration (followed closely by annoyance at the incovenience.)

Here in Sydney, a ‘wintry mix’ would just be a bit of rain and coldness warranting a thick jumper (or ‘sweater’ as its called in the Northern Hemisphere, right?!). I used to live in London, and although I did used to winge madly at the persistent cold, there were those lovely days spent on a dark leather couch in a cosy pub with a fire not far away… I loved the ‘wintry mix’ on those days :-)

I don’t know much about winter weather terminology—I’m a native Californian, we don’t get that much variety. But my all time favorite weather forecast I read on the front page of the daily newspaper in Suva, Fiji, which said: “Mainly fine.”

That’s how I want my weather every day, mainly fine.

Yep, here in the UK we’d call that ‘sleet’

sleet |slēt| noun a form of precipitation consisting of ice pellets, often mixed with rain or snow.

• a thin coating of ice formed by sleet or rain freezing on contact with a cold surface.

Thanks, Matt. I did check my dictionary, but still I was starting to think that I might have been imagining the word “sleet.”

And had I looked closer in my dictionary (the same as yours I can tell, i.e. Oxford’s in Tiger), I probably would have noticed the “ice pellets” term in the definition. As atotic succinctly puts it: “Ice pellets?” I’m inclined to agree; that is a strange way of describing it. Makes it sound mechanically mass-produced.

“I think if you look really close at it, you can see locusts.”

I laughed, I cried, that was better than Cats and Dogs living together.

:)