[f. WHIRL- + BLAST sb.; app. a word of the Cumberland dialect, for which Wordsworth is the earliest literary authority.] A whirlwind, hurricane. Also fig.
1798. Wordsw., Poems of Fancy, iii. A whirl-blast from behind the hill Rushed o’er the wood.
1807. Stagg, Misc. Poems, Return, xvi. Hark, the whurlblast loudly blusters.
1813. Coleridge, Nt.-Scene, 77. The whirl-blast comes, the desert-sands rise up.
1820. Shelley, Witch Alt., xlviii. Which rain could never bend, or whirl-blast shake.
1851. Mayne Reid, Scalp Hunters, xi. Vast towers of sand, borne up by the whirlblast, rise vertically.
1904. Dowden, R. Browning, 246. There is a fixity of grief which is more appalling than this whirlblast.
