Himalaya

The Himalaya range wears its description in its name. “Himalaya” comes from Sanskrit and joins two words: hima, meaning “snow” or “frost,” and ālaya, meaning “abode,” “dwelling” or “receptacle.” Together they form himālaya — “the abode of snow,” a fittingly majestic name for the highest mountains on earth.

The root hima is an ancient one, belonging to the same Indo-European family that gives Latin hiems (“winter”) and Greek kheimōn (“winter, storm”). It appears across Sanskrit literature and in the names of other snowy places and the Himalayan region has been revered in Indian tradition for millennia, personified in myth and poetry as a mighty king of mountains.

Strictly speaking, because the plural is built into the sense, English usage varies between “the Himalaya” and “the Himalayas.” Both are common; purists sometimes prefer the former, since the name already denotes the whole snowy expanse rather than a single peak.

From the Sanskrit through centuries of use and onto modern maps, the name has stayed remarkably faithful to its meaning. When we speak of the Himalaya we are, without realising it, calling those peaks exactly what the ancient poets did: the dwelling place of the snows.