The Hindi and Urdu word for weather (मौसम / موسم), from the Arabic mawsim meaning "season" — the same root that gave English the word monsoon.
VocabularyMausam — the word, its spellings and where it comes from
Mausam (मौसम in Devanagari, موسم in Nastaliq) is the everyday word for weather across northern India and Pakistan. It is one of the most searched weather words in South Asia, and it is searched in a dozen different spellings, because it is a word people type phonetically rather than from a dictionary.
Why the spelling varies so much
Hindi and Urdu are written in scripts that do not map one-to-one onto the Latin alphabet, so transliteration is a matter of habit rather than rule. The vowel in the first syllable sits between the English “ow” of how and the “aw” of saw, and the second syllable’s vowel is reduced in speech, which is why it is sometimes written and sometimes dropped.
The spellings people actually use, all referring to the same word:
| spelling | notes |
|---|---|
| mausam | the most common romanisation, and the one used on this site |
| mosam | drops the diphthong; common in casual typing |
| mausham | inserts an “h” reflecting the aspirated pronunciation some speakers use |
| musam | reduced first vowel |
| mosum, moshm, mausm | phonetic attempts, frequent in search queries |
None of these is wrong. If you searched for any of them and arrived here, you searched correctly.
Where the word comes from
Mausam entered Hindi and Urdu from the Arabic mawsim (موسم), meaning “season” or “a fixed time of year” — originally the season at which Arab traders could sail with a favourable wind. Portuguese sailors in the Indian Ocean borrowed the same Arabic word as monção, which English took as monsoon.
So mausam and monsoon are the same word, arriving in two languages by two routes: one overland into Hindustani, one by sea into European languages. That shared origin is why a word that now means “weather” in general once meant specifically “the season of the reversing wind”.
Related words you will see on this site
- मौसम का हाल (mausam ka haal) — “the state of the weather”, i.e. current conditions.
- आज का मौसम (aaj ka mausam) — “today’s weather”.
- कल का मौसम (kal ka mausam) — “tomorrow’s weather”. Note that kal means both yesterday and tomorrow in Hindi; context decides.
- बारिश (barish) — rain, as distinct from the monsoon as a season.
- मौसम विभाग (mausam vibhag) — the weather department, i.e. the India Meteorological Department.
In Urdu
The Urdu موسم is the same word with the same meaning, and Pakistani search traffic uses the same range of romanisations. Urdu adds موسمیات (mausamiyat) for meteorology as a discipline, and پیشن گوئی (peshan goi) for forecast.