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weather

/ˈweðər//ˈweðə/·verb
to come safely through something difficult; to be worn by exposure
Fig. 1 — The storm arrives with a full agenda: the sky closes, rain comes in sideways, the tree lies nearly flat with its leaves streaming, and the little barn shudders on its frame — one shingle lifting, the door testing its hinges, lightning taking two quick photographs of everything.
01Definition

As a verb, weather means to take what the sky — or the market, or the scandal — can throw, and still be standing afterwards: a ship weathers a gale, a government weathers a crisis. The image is nautical — a ship clawing its way past the storm to safety. The verb's second sense records the cost of exposure over time: rock weathers into soil, and a weathered face or fence has its history written on the surface. Endure the storm, or be marked by it — the same verb keeps both books.

02In use
  • iThe firm proved robust enough to weather two recessions without a single layoff.
  • iiResilient coastal towns have weathered worse storms than this one.
  • iiiGranite weathers so slowly that the inscription is still legible after three centuries.
03Collocations
  • weather the storm
  • weather a crisis
  • weathered wood
  • a weathered face
  • weather the downturn

Family weathered (adjective) · weathering (noun)

04Relations

=withstand, survive, ride out, endure, come through

≠succumb, collapse, give way

06TOEFL & IELTS

Two exam jobs. In writing and speaking, 'weather the storm' upgrades 'survive a difficult period' — companies, governments and relationships all weather crises, and the idiom is formal enough for essays. In TOEFL geology passages, weathering is the technical term for rock broken down in place by exposure (distinct from erosion, which carries the pieces away). Do not confuse the verb with the everyday noun, and never with whether — the commonest homophone slip in English.

07Asked
What does 'weather the storm' mean?
To come through a difficult period without being destroyed. Modern storms are usually financial or political: firms weather downturns, ministers weather scandals. The idiom promises survival, not comfort; like the barn in the scene above, what weathers the storm is still standing, but rarely unmarked.
What is the difference between weather and whether?
Homophones with nothing else in common: weather is the sky and the verb for enduring it; whether introduces alternatives — ask whether the weather will hold. A memory hook: weather contains 'eat' (storms eat at things); whether is built like 'either', its closest cousin in meaning. Spell-checkers pass both, so timed writing has to catch the swap by hand.
Can weather really be used as a verb?
Fully — and in two directions. Transitively it means to endure and outlast: the crew weathered the gale, the company weathered the merger. In the exposure sense it can even be intransitive: cedar weathers to silver-grey. Conjugation is regular (weathered, weathering), and the idiom conjugates with it: 'we have weathered worse' is native-speaker shorthand for hard-won experience.
What does weathered mean, as in a weathered face?
Marked by long exposure — the verb's second sense frozen into an adjective. Weathered wood has gone grey and grainy, weathered brick has softened at the edges, and a weathered face carries decades of outdoor work in its lines. The word is not an insult: it implies history and endurance, surfaces that took the exposure and kept their shape.
What is weathering in geology, and how is it different from erosion?
Weathering is rock being broken down in place — frost wedging it, rain dissolving it, roots prying it — while erosion is the transport, wind and water carrying the fragments away. The geology term is the verb's exposure sense made technical: material worn by weather. TOEFL earth-science passages test exactly this division of labour, so it pays to keep the two processes filed separately.
Where does the expression 'weather the storm' come from?
From sailing. To weather something, in the old nautical sense, was to get to windward of it — a ship that weathered a headland or a storm had clawed its way past the danger to safety. The phrase came ashore in the seventeenth century and never left; every company that 'weathers a difficult quarter' is still, linguistically, a small ship getting past a large weather system.