ਮੌਸਮ

Mausam (ਮੌਸਮ), pronounced maw-sam, is the Punjabi word for weather, and it also covers the idea of a season. It is a masculine noun. Asking about the mausam is asking how the sky, the air and the day itself are behaving, today or across a whole part of the year.

Meaning

In daily use, mausam most often means the weather at a given time: whether it is hot, cold, clear, cloudy or rainy. Punjabi vocabulary lists give ਮੌਸਮ as the direct word for weather, and a weather expert is a mausam vigyani, a meteorologist. The same word stretches further than a single day, because people also speak of the mausam of a season, the general pattern that comes back year after year.

What are the seasons called in Punjabi?

Seasons in Punjabi are built on the word rutt, which means a season. Modern speech uses four: basant rutt for spring, garmi rutt for summer, sharad rutt for autumn and siaal rutt for winter. Traditional Punjabi culture counts six, adding varkha rutt, the monsoon, and hemant rutt, the weeks just before winter. The Kosh has separate entries for garmi and sardi, the heat and the cold that mark the two extremes of the Punjabi year.

How is mausam used in everyday speech?

The commonest question in Punjab may be this one: ajj da mausam kiven hai, how is the weather today. A pleasant day is changa mausam or suhavna mausam, and bad weather is kharab mausam. Farmers watch the mausam before sowing, families plan weddings and journeys around it, and in the diaspora a phone call home often begins with a report on the mausam at both ends.

Is mausam the same as rutt?

They overlap, but they are not identical. Rutt names a season itself, one named stretch of the year. Mausam is wider: it is the weather on a given day, and by extension the feel of a whole season. A speaker asking about today will almost always choose mausam, while the set names of the seasons are built with rutt.