Of course it has no such thing, and the headline is misleading.
It has 421 words that to varying degrees are related to snow.
If you look at the actual online thesaurus [1], and expand the subcategories, you see that this includes e.g. specific types of clothing worn in snow or stormy weather.
Feel free to write to them to complain. They might change their methodology if enough people do; as it stands, their metrics keep telling them these 'articles' are popular.
More seriously - is the headline supposed to be a statement of fact, i.e. "Scots have 421 words for snow"? The article would seem to indicate it is indeed a fact, and the 'quote' is not actually a quote.
I honestly 'hate' the use of these 'quotes'. Does anyone with any BBC knowledge know what the reasoning is behind these?
If you are interested in the relationship between language and landscape/environment then I'd strongly recommend Robert Macfarlane's book Landmarks [1][2]. Definitely one of my reading highlights of the last year.
