For more than two days in September 1974, the people of Honduras shut their windows, locked their doors and covered in their homes. Fifi was outside, and they were frightened. By the time Fifi had left, 8,000 people were dead, Fifi wasn't a pet dog as the name suggests. It was a hurricane, one of the most destructive natural phenomena in the world. Why do we give human names to storms and hurricanes? We didn't always. Two hundred years ago, many hurricanes in the Caribbean were named after the saint's day on which the storm occurred. Later, storms were known by the name of the city where they came ashore. Meteorologists   then tried naming storms after the latitude   and longitude   where they occurred. Finally, in 1953, hurricanes started getting people's names --specifically, female names. Male names were added in 1979. There are six sets of names for what the experts call "Atlantic tropical cyclones"( ). Each list is used every six years and consists of 21 names, starting with every letter but Q, U, X, Y ,Z. the names alternate  between male and female. A storm won't get a name until its winds reach 39 mph or about 62.4 kph, at which point it becomes a tropical storm. At 74 mph or 118.4 kph it's declared a hurricane. The 126 names on the list are used only for storms that form off the Atlantic coast of the US. There are separate lists for the Pacific. So what happens if a hurricane should cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific? It's happened before. The storm just gets a new name and sometimes a new sex. Max Mayfield is the director of the National Hurricane Centre, headquartered in Miami, Florida. He is in charge of picking new names for storms off the Atlantic coast. He doesn't do it alone, though. His _ in two dozen other countries in the Caribbean, Central America and North America vote on what names will replace retired names. The names for storms and hurricanes, as this passage shows,  _  .
are set for use. are all from American English are difficult to spell are easy to fix