The direction opposite to north, toward the South Pole; one of the four cardinal compass points.
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Proto-Germanicbefore 900 CEwell-attested
From Old English 'sūþ' (south, the south, southward), from Proto-Germanic *sunþrą (south, southward), generallybelieved to derive from the PIE root *suh₂n- or *sāwel- meaning 'sun.' South was thus 'the sun side' or 'the direction of the sun,' since in the Northern Hemisphere the sun's arc traces across the southern sky — at noon the sun stands due south for any observer north of the Tropic of Cancer. This solar etymologymakes 'south' a fundamentally Northern-Hemisphere concept: the word encodes the
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The Scottish region of Sutherland — which is in the far north of mainland Britain — is called 'Sutherland' because the Norse settlers who named it lived in Orkney and Caithness, even farther north. To the Vikings, Sutherland was their 'southern land.'
direction. The compound 'Sutherland' in Scotland means 'southern land' — southern, that is, from the perspective of Norse settlers in Orkney for whom mainland Scotland lay to the south. Old English 'sūþerne' (southern) preserves the directional suffix that became modern '-ern' in 'southern,' 'northern,' 'eastern,' 'western' — a suffix unique to the cardinal directions. Key roots: *suh₂n- / *sewH- (Proto-Indo-European: "sun").