Inuit and Yupik languages contain 50, 100, or even 200 different words for snow due to their arctic environment.
The 'Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax,' popularised by linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s, was based on a misreading of a 1911 anthropological paper. Inuit and Yupik languages do have more snow-related terms than English through productive derivational morphology, but most counts are inflated by treating different grammatical forms of the same root as separate 'words.' Standard Inuktitut has roughly 9-12 distinct roots related to snow, more than English but far fewer than the mythical 50+. The myth persisted because it supported the appealing Sapir-Whorf hypothesis about linguistic relativity.