Short answers, pulled from the story.
Wind is the natural movement of air or other gases relative to a planet's surface. It is caused by differences in atmospheric pressure, which are primarily due to temperature differences, with air moving from higher to lower pressure. On a rotating planet, that moving air is also deflected by the Coriolis effect.
The strongest wind gust on Earth reached 408 km/h on Australia's Barrow Island during tropical Cyclone Olivia on the 10th of April 1996. It surpassed the previous record of 372 km/h set on Mount Washington, New Hampshire, on the 12th of April 1934.
Wind direction is named for the direction the wind comes from, not where it is heading. A western or westerly wind blows from the west to the east, and a northern wind blows toward the south. This convention is sometimes counter-intuitive.
The Beaufort wind force scale was created by Francis Beaufort to describe wind speed from observed sea conditions. It began as a 13-level scale numbered 0 through 12 and was expanded during the 1940s to 18 levels running 0 through 17. Gale-force winds within it lie between 28 kn and 55 kn.
Wind speed is measured by anemometers, most commonly using rotating cups or propellers. Sustained wind speeds are reported globally at a 10 m height and averaged over a 10-minute time frame. The United States uses a 1-minute average for tropical cyclones, while India typically reports a 3-minute average.
The solar wind is a stream of charged particles, a plasma ejected from the Sun's upper atmosphere at a rate of 400 km/s, consisting mostly of electrons and protons with energies of about 1 keV. It creates the Heliosphere and causes geomagnetic storms, the aurorae, and the plasma tails of comets.
The fastest wind ever recorded came from the accretion disc of the black hole IGR J17091-3624, blowing at 20,000,000 mph, which is 3% of the speed of light. The fastest wind on any known planet is on HD 80606 b, 190 light years away, where it blows at more than 11,000 mph or 5 km/s.