Wintry or Wintery?

[deso]

Why is it "wintry" and not "wintery", given than it's "summery" (and not "summry"), "autumnal", and "Spring-like" (maybe that should be "springy"!)

[jno]

it just is - don't look for logic in the English language! (My guess would be that by the time spellings became fixed in the 18th century, the word was already being pronounced as two syllables.)

And what do Americans use instead of autumnal? Fallal?

[deso]

Good question about the americans jno. You should post it.

[Quizmonster]

In a sense, you could still use either 'wintry' or 'wintery'. For example, you might describe a cold, miserable day in May as being 'A wintry day', but you would probably not say 'She was wearing a wintry coat.'
Of course, people would normally say 'She was wearing a winter coat', but that needn't prevent you from saying 'She was wearing a wintery coat.' There, you are adding the 'y' in the same way as we often do with words, as in 'It was a sort of pastelly shade' or 'It was an orangey-browny colour.'

[Quizmonster]

Oh...re fall, don't Americans just use the word 'fall' as an adjective as well as a noun? "Fall leaves are especially attractive"..."Our Fall Festival attracts visitors from around the world every September" and so on.
Mind you, I seem to racall Bart Simpson claiming once that he was having pain "in the chestal area". So, I daresay, he at least might talk about "fallal leaves"!

[jno]

I'm sure you're right QM but I think in the examples you give, 'fall' would be replaced in British English by just 'autumn', rather than 'autumnal'. 'Autumnal' means something a bit more moody than just a description of the season; I'm not sure how the Americans would express it.

[francoise_11]

Americans say "autumnal." (I think you know that already.)

[eprunier]

@Quizmonster: "Fall" in your examples isn't an adjective, but a noun used attributively. Like the word 'car' in 'car park' or 'mountain' in 'mountain range'. One way of seeing whether a word is more likely to be a noun or an adjective is to use it predicatively: we wouldn't say 'that park is very car' or 'that range looks a bit mountain'. Similarly we wouldn't say 'the light is quite fall' - we'd say 'the light is quite autumnal'.