There were no blizzards on the Yorkshire moors in the Bronte sisters' time. Neither, when intoning Blow, blow thy winter wind, did Shakespeare drop any hint of blizzards in the offing. Keats, Shelley or Byron never heard of blizzards, and Wordsworth recollected not a single blizzard in tranquillity. Blizzards, in fact, did not exist until 1888.
Their arrival was not due to climate change, but to evolving etymology. In the US, where they are relatively common, a blizzard is defined as "great amounts of falling and/or blowing snow accompanied by winds in excess of 35 m.p.h. resulting in less than a quarter of a mile of visibility for a pe riod of time lasting more than three hours" - a description with which, no doubt, many readers can identify.
But the term was first used, apparently, in 1870 in a respected publication called [I]the Northern Vindicator, a local newspaper in the Iowa town of Esterville.
Many early settlers in Iowa came from Germany, it seems, and when they experienced the severe winter storms on the Great Plains, they would exclaim "Der Sturm kommt blitzartig": "the storm comes like lightning". The transition from blitzartig to "blizzard" was, the paper said, a natural, even if not entirely logical, progression in linguistics.
Even then, no one outside Iowa had heard of "blizzards". The term only came into general use in the US when it was widely applied in the newspapers to what is now remembered as the Great Blizzard of 1888, which brought the eastern seaboard to a standstill on March 12th that year.
A few days later, that same storm moved across the Atlantic to hit Britain on March 18th, where it was still referred to as a "blizzard".
Having dismissed as frivolous the explanation that such a storm might be named after a Blizzard family of Buckinghamshire, who had emigrated to the US some years previously, the Times declared that the word had its source in an expression of the English midlands: "Well, I be blizzered".
This apparently was a common pronouncement by persons amazed by startling news.
"Nonsense," replied the New York Times, deciding to ignore the Germans in Iowa. "It is merely a bit of onomatopoeia; like the hoofbeats in Virgil's poetry, the word is simply supposed to sound more or less like the thing it denotes."
By March 19th, the now famous blizzard had moved across the channel to the Continent and the German news papers had to have their pfennig-worth. Naturally they were inclined to favour Iowa, and proclaimed that the word was definitely German after all.