What Does "Wuthering" Mean in 'Wuthering Heights?'

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is one of the most popular and influential novels in English literature. The book has inspired countless film adaptations, including Emerald Fennell’s controversial 2026 rendition starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, as well as hit songs and much more. It also continues to fuel widespread interest in Emily Brontë’s life and inspirations. 

However, despite the book’s popularity, many people still might find themselves unaware of what wuthering actually means. It turns out that wuthering is a real word, albeit one that few people use or know in modern times—yet it describes one of the novel’s most central and consequential images.

What Does Wuthering Mean?

The word wuthering is an adjective that, according to Cambridge Dictionary, is “used to describe a wind that is blowing very strongly or a place where the wind blows strongly.” It is sometimes used interchangeably with the word whithering, though this term is much rarer, and both have their roots in the Old Norse term hvitha, which means “a squall of wind.” The term wuthering is sometimes also associated with the roaring sound that comes with strong winds.

In essence, wuthering means extremely windy—and Brontë, ever the consummate wordsmith, could not have chosen a more apt term to title her sole novel. Wind, and specifically the wind that blows across the moors surrounding Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff’s homes in Wuthering Heights, is a character in itself in the book, creating a haunting atmosphere of chaos and desolation that pervades the entire story. 

Wuthering is also a variation on the terms wuther and wither. According to C. Clough Robinson’s A Glossary of Words used in the Dialect of Mid-Yorkshire (1876), these terms meant “to hurl, with an impetus imparting a trembling or whizzing motion to the object thrown,” and wuthering, specifically, also could “denote any object of huge size, or a person who, in conjunction with a heavy appearance, has a violent manner of displaying activity.” In the context of this definition and the domestic violence and emotional intensity featured in the book, wuthering becomes an even more appropriate title.

What Does "Wuthering Heights" Mean in the Book?

In Brontë's book, Wuthering Heights is the name of the remote farmhouse where Cathy lives as a child. It is also the home that a young, orphaned Heathcliff moves into when the house’s master, Cathy’s father, brings him home from London, and the house’s imposing, cold nature provides the main setting for the novel’s primary events.

Along with the wild moors outside, the house acts as a mirror of the book’s protagonists’ wild inner natures, which could easily be described as stormy, windy, or perhaps most accurately, wuthering.