AILLPUV

Word of the Week

A feature wherein TileHead highlights a word that is is especially interesting or unusual (and, incidentally, useful in Scrabble play):

AILLPUV

(unscramble the letters to form this week's word...)

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(answer below, after a little more spoiler space....)

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This week's word is...

PLUVIAL (n. pl. -S)

• Definitions:
  
  1. (n.) a prolonged period of rainy weather
  2. (n.) a cloak worn by a senior cleric for protection against the rain or for ceremonial occasions
  3. (adj.) of or relating to rain; rainy

• Front hooks: (none)
• Back hooks: -S
• Anagrams: (none)
• Longer extensions: INTER-
• Wraparounds: (none)
• Other Spellings: (none)
• Related Forms: PLUVIAN (adj.), PLUVIOSE (adj.), PLUVIOUS (adj.)

TileHead says:

Deriving from the Latin pluvialis ("rainy"), forms of this word began appearing in English as early as the 1500s.  It is sometimes used in scientific senses, with reference to PLUVIAL and INTERPLUVIAL periods:

Although desert conditions have existed periodically in the region for approximately 70 million years, the southwestern deserts as they exist today are relatively young, with no more than 12,000 years having passed since the last wetter, pluvial period when the area contained abundant, interconnected standing and running water.
– Gene S. Helfman, Bruce B. Collette, & Douglas E. Facey, Diversity of Fishes (1997)

It is also frequently encountered in literary and jocular senses, along with interchangeable forms such as PLUVIAN, PLUVIOSE, and PLUVIOUS:

Never, even in his own pluvious land, had Roderick seen such a deluge as that which shortly swept down upon the poor little town hour after hour.
– Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, "Young Mrs. Jardine" in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (1879)

Both yesterday and today were novel and absurd days, and certain not quite intelligible, but significant, outlines were showing through confusedly. Like that darkish solution in which mountain views would presently float and grow clear, this rain, this delicate pluvial damp, developed shiny images in her soul.
– Vladimir Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave: A Novel (1968)

Normandy is, after all, one of the most pluviose provinces of France.
– Julian Barnes in Jim Shepard's Writers at the Movies (2000)

Incidentally, Pluviose was also the name of the fifth month of the French Revolutionary Calendar, a calendar based on natural and logical principles used by the French government between 1793-1805, in those heady days of revolution and reform on both sides of the Atlantic.  Pluviose (the "rainy" month) extended from approximately January 20th to February 18th and fell between the months of Nivose (the "snowy" month) and Ventose (the "windy" month).  Some features of the calendar were unpopular or impractical and the government soon reverted to the common Gregorian calendar, but another logical system of reform championed in France around the same time – the Metric System – remains in widespread use throughout most of the world.