Misnamed phenomenon

My trusty Webster's dictionary describes a water-spout as a "funnel-shaped or tubular column of rotating cloud-filled wind usually extending from the underside of a cumulus or cumulonimbus cloud down to a cloud of spray torn up by the whirling winds...

My trusty Webster's dictionary describes a water-spout as a "funnel-shaped or tubular column of rotating cloud-filled wind usually extending from the underside of a cumulus or cumulonimbus cloud down to a cloud of spray torn up by the whirling winds from the surface of an ocean or lake".

Surely the caption under the photograph on page 60 of The Times of July 19 should have identified the phenomenon pictured as such. A whirlpool is "water moving rapidly in a circle so as to produce a depression in the centre into which floating objects may be drawn".

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