Page "Tornado" Paragraph 5

The word tornado is an altered form of the Spanish word tronada, which means " thunderstorm ".

This in turn was taken from the Latin tonare, meaning " to thunder ".

It most likely reached its present form through a combination of the Spanish tronada and tornar (" to turn "); however, this may be a folk etymology.

A tornado is also commonly referred to as a " twister ", and is also sometimes referred to by the old-fashioned colloquial term cyclone.

The term " cyclone " is used as a synonym for " tornado " in the often-aired 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz.

The term " twister " is also used in that film, along with being the title of the 1996 tornado-related film Twister.