Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	(85/100)
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
Entertainment Weekly	A−
The Independent
Los Angeles Times
NME	7/10
The Observer
Paste Magazine	8.5/10
Pitchfork	8.5/10
Slant Magazine
Spin	7/10

50 Words for Snow is the tenth studio album by English singer-songwriter Kate Bush. It is the second album to be released on her own label, Fish People. It is her first all-new studio album since "Aerial" from 2005, and marks the first time since 1978 that she has released two new albums in one year. The album spawned one single, "Wild Man", which was released as a digital download to promote the album.

50 Words for Snow, her second album of 2011 after Director's Cut, was released on 21 November 2011. The album consists of seven songs "set against a backdrop of falling snow" and has a running time of 65 minutes.

A radio edit of the first single "Wild Man" was played on BBC Radio 2's Ken Bruce Show on 10 October. The single, featuring both the radio edit as well as the album version, was released on 11 October. Andy Fairweather Low guest stars on this story of a group of people exploring the Himalayas who, upon finding evidence of the elusive, mythical Yeti, out of compassion cover up all traces of its footprints. Priya Elan in the New Musical Express greeted the single with enthusiasm, saying: "For those of us who have been secretly longing for a return to the unflinchingly bizarre and Bush's ability to conjure up strange new worlds, 'Wild Man' is a deep joy."

In an interview with the American radio station KCRW, Bush said that the idea for the album's title song came from thinking about the myth that Eskimos have 50 words for snow, which led her to make up increasingly fantastical words herself, such as "spangladasha", "anechoic", "blown from Polar fur", and "Robber's Veil". The album's songs are built around Bush's quietly jazzy piano and Steve Gadd's drums (she had just started working with him and praised his "brilliant drumming"), and utilize both sung and spoken word vocals in what Classic Rock's Stephen Dalton calls "a...supple and experimental affair, with a contemporary chamber pop sound grounded in crisp piano, minimal percussion and light-touch electronics...billowing jazz-rock soundscapes, interwoven with fragmentary narratives delivered in a range of voices from shrill to Laurie Anderson-style cooing." Bassist Danny Thompson also appears on the album.

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