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While “cardinal winds” could mean a breeze outside carrying hundreds of cardinals across the sky (and personally, seeing cardinals in winter always makes me happy, so I would be ok with that meaning), the term is actually used in meteorology to refer to winds from the four cardinal directions on the compass, i.e. north, east, south and west.
If you’re wondering why those four directions are called “cardinal” directions in the first place, one source suggests that “cardinal” comes from the early 14th century and was derived from the Latin word cardinalis, which meant “principal, chief, essential.”
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