Indian summer

Later research showed that the earliest known reference to Indian summer in its current sense occurs in an essay written in the United States around 1778 by J. Hector St. John de Crevecœur, describing the character of autumn and implying the common usage of the expression Great rains at last replenish the springs, the brooks, the swamp and impregnate the earth.

Then a severe frost succeeds which prepares it to receive the voluminous coat of snow which is soon to follow; though it is often preceded by a short interval of smoke and mildness, called the Indian Summer.

This is in general the invariable rule: winter is not said properly to begin until those few moderate days & the raising of the water has announced it to Man.The essay was first published in French around 1788, but remained unavailable in the United States until the 1920s.

[8] Native-American legends mention the god or "Life-Giver" bestowing warm autumnal weather to various warriors or peoples, enabling them to survive after great misfortune, such as loss of crops.

However, early 20th-century climatologists Gordon Manley and Hubert Lamb used it only when referring to the American phenomenon, and the expression did not gain wide currency in Great Britain until the 1950s.

[13][14] In the English translation of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, the term is used to describe the unseasonably warm weather leading up to the October Revolution.

A warm period in autumn is called Altweibersommer ("old women's summer") in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lithuania, Hungary (Hungarian: vénasszonyok nyara), Estonia (Estonian: vananaistesuvi), and in a number of Slavic-language countries—for example, in the Czech Republic, Ukraine,[16] Poland, Slovakia, Russia[17] and Slovenia, – it is known as "(old) women's summer" (German: Altweibersommer; Czech: babí léto; Ukrainian: бабине літо, IPA: [babyne lito], Polish: babie lato; Slovak: babie leto; Russian: бабье лето, IPA: [ˈbabʲjə ˈlʲetə]).

[20] The American Meteorological Society (AMS) also notes that a similar phenomenon may be referred to poetically as halcyon days, a term that originated in Greek mythology.