Bonus points if there’s a known onomatopoeia to describe the sound.
Nothing more fancy in Boston than “snow”.
Yeah that’s a common one, I wonder if it would seen as more or less commonly like that depending on how cold the local climate is.
California, here, and not any of the parts that get snow. (Closest we get is hail, which feels like it happens maybe twice a decade.) We called it “snow,” too. :)
French: “neige” is used. Yes, it means snow.
It’s χιόνι which means snow in Greece and we are not very cold.
That’s for sure
We called it static.
War of the ants
What prompted this question is some Japanese TV service ended this past weekend for a relative and the word to describe the static noise was “sand storm”.
Thought it might be interesting to hear what it’s called elsewhere.
So Japan still uses analog broadcast TV? Maybe it’s different for other US TVs, but since the switch to the digital broadcast system my TVs show black when a channel is not available. Snow has gone the way of the old test pattern of years ago.
Analog went offline in Japan around 2010/2011 if my memory serves me correctly, but some still have digital receivers that works with the RF jack. Now more or less it’s out of style and the static is just proverbial.
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It’s snow
In Chiba city, it is described as “The sky above the port”
We called it the “Chinese rice fight”
…the 80s was a different time lol
Hahaha, if you remove the stereotype and reference to China, it makes for a reasonable approximation of the visuals and sound, imagining a torrent of rice being blasted at you.
Always called it “Ant races”
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Me too! It was about 30 years ago for me.
That’s neat! What’s your country/region?
Oregon, USA about 30 years ago
I use a related phrase in Photoshop. If you have something selected, the movement around the thing is “running ants”.
Back in the days when we all had antennas and cable hadn’t been born yet, the static stations were a great thing to watch if there might be a tornado in your area. Apparently if one formed, it would significantly change the look of the snow on the TV and give you a warning to quickly head to the basement. I never actually saw it happen, but there were a couple times we had local warnings and my parents plopped me down to keep an eye on the TV.
Never heard about this. Interesting tid bit.
I remember getting our first tv about 1982 I think.
I actually started questioning whether this was something my parent’s told me to keep me busy, but turns out it’s a real thing.
Static or Snow where I grew up in the US Southeast
Same!
UK here, we just called it static.
Dreh die Antenne nach links, ich krieg nur rauschen hier unten.
It would be white noise, “weißes rauschen”, but nobody ever said the “white” part.
The sky above the port.
In Ukraine we say that “the image/display is snowing” (зображення/екран сніжить)
