A noun in the Gnomish Lexicon of the 1910s glossed “a storm”, but Tolkien clarified that it was “properly of snow, but that sense has evaporated” (GL/60), in other words that its use was originally limited to snow storms, but it came to be used of storms in general. It is clearly based on the early root ᴱ√NIQI which had a number of other “snow” derivatives, as noted by Christopher Tolkien (LT1A/Taniquetil).