snows
- 1Third-person singular simple present of snow.
It snows for months on end in the high Arctic.
When it snows here, the roads close within an hour.
Note
Weather verbs need a subject that means nothing, so the everyday form is "it snows," with the dummy it standing where no agent exists. The same form also serves the transitive uses. A tree snows blossoms onto a path, and in slang a salesman snows a customer with flattery or confusing detail. The object tells them apart, because impersonal snowing takes none.
- 2Plural of snow.
The spring snows melted slowly into the swollen rivers.
Ancient snows still cap the highest peaks year-round.
Note
Counting is what this plural is for. Snow is ordinarily a mass noun, so the plural appears only when snow comes in units: separate snowfalls, the winters they mark, drifts and spreads of it, even the whipped egg-white dish called a snow. Comparing places is a natural home for it, as in "the snows in Alaska" versus "the snows here," where each plural means the kind of snow a region gets.
- 3Short, informal term for snow tires.
She swapped her summer tires for snows in late October.
The mechanic recommended a fresh set of snows for the icy commute.
Note
A clipping that keeps the modifier and drops the tire. Snow tires shrinks to snows, which stays plural like the full term. It belongs to garage talk and to the compressed prose of classified ads; a 1984 ad in Gay Community News offers a car with "roofrack, snows, manual." Context separates it from the ordinary plural of snow, because you put snows on a car, not on a mountain.
- 4Either polar region of the Earth (the Arctic, the Antarctic, or both) where snow persists throughout the year.
The expedition wintered in the southern snows before attempting the pole.
Tales of the northern snows filled the old whaler's journals.
Note
A plural with no singular in this meaning: the polar regions are always the snows, with the article and a plural verb. Ralph Waldo Emerson set it against the tropics in 1844, "betwixt the snows and the tropics," and that pairing shows its character. It is a grand shorthand for the far extremes of the globe, more at home in rhetoric than on a map.
Less common meaning
- 5A woman's pale breasts, evoked in poetry as white as snow.
The sonnet lingered on the lady's snows and her blushing cheeks.
Beneath the loosened bodice, her snows lay half concealed.
Note
A poet's comparison hardened into a noun: fair skin was likened to snow until the plural alone could stand for a woman's breasts. It is dated as well as poetic, so in present-day writing it reads as deliberate period pastiche or as a parody of overwrought love verse. Use it only where that antique, ornamental effect is the point. In plain description it sounds arch.
Showing meanings only.
snows is a form of snow
snow, verb: Of the weather, with the dummy subject 'it': to have snow fall from the atmosphere. Full entry
- Spelling
- snow → snows: add -s
Use it in a sentence
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Origin
Formed from "snow" plus the suffix "-s," which makes regular noun plurals (and pluralia tantum) as well as the third-person singular present tense of verbs.