What do you say to describe a drencher?
© Gregor Kervina / Hemera

Rain Sayings in Different Cultures

The one thing about rain is that it’s wet! All over the world.  But apart from that essential characteristic, the different cultures and languages of the world have found varied ways to describe rain, especially when it’s a gully washer.

Bucketloads of Wet

In Spain, a heavy rain comes down a cántaros (in jugfuls).  In a number of other countries—Finland, Romania, and Russia, for example—it “rains like from a bucket.”

Buckets, jugs, basins, and barrels all figure into rain sayings around the world.
© Dawn Hudson / iStock

Not sure if the eye of the Spaniard envisions a heavier rain than the eye of the Russian, but either analogy works—water comes pouring out of both jugs and buckets.

A bit harder to picture are solid objects falling from the sky. In Czechoslovakia, it rains wheelbarrows. (Yikes! That could hurt.) And wheelbarrows are an odd shape, but like buckets and jugs, these gardening containers spill a flood of water.

It’s easier to picture the language metaphor when the object is at least vertical, the way rain falls:

• In Greece, it rains chair legs.
• In Wales, knives and forks.
• Long strings of rope in Turkey.
• Threads and strings in Germany.
• Pitchforks in Britain and pipe stems in Holland.

When Rain Gets Legs

Sometimes a deluge takes on a life of its own, and animal metaphors creep into the description.

For example, the Americans and the French, who have ties of friendship going back centuries, both see four legs in the rain. Nevertheless, they have different views of what stands on those legs.

• In the USA, it rains cats and dogs.
• In France, il pleut des grenouilles (it rains frogs).

Rainy weather patterns in the USA speak of cats and dogs.
© Bruce Rolff / Hemera

Frog rain is a true phenomenon. Lightweight animals can get picked up in a storm and sent back to earth with the rain. That probably explains the Brazilian expression Chovem cobras e lagartos (It’s raining snakes and lizards), but it doesn’t help much with why it rains “toads’ beards” in Portugal.

Reptiles and amphibians are not the highest life form associated with a heavy rain. Two-leggers play a role as well:

• In Norway, a drencher comes with she-trolls.
• The Welsh see old ladies and sticks.
• And I wonder if Colombian women smile during a downpour. There, it rains hasta maridos (even husbands)!

More than One Way to Talk Rain

Of course, most languages offer more than one way to refer to a downpour. Though the French, like the Poles, describe some storms as raining frogs, the French also talk about wet weather as raining ropes, like the Turks, or buckets, like the Finns.

Advice for frogs:
Better to raise the umbrella
than to get raised in the rain.
© julos / iStock

So it seems that some rain sayings go across cultures. Costa Rica even borrowed the cats and dogs saying from the US, but in Spanish the dogs get first billing: Están lloviendo perros y gatos (It’s raining dogs and cats).

The next time a heavy rainstorm comes your way, borrow some colorful rain sayings from the world and share the creative words of different cultures. You’ll be anything but all wet!

♦♦♦

Find more weather idioms and other sayings across cultures at Omniglot and Wikipedia.

For more language fun across cultures, see ways that people in the world greet each other and say good-bye in “Don’t Say Good-bye to Saying Hello” and “How’s Life in Costa Rica?“.  For a fun comparison of cultural differences in the language of love, read about the different rules for the daisy petal-pulling love game in France and the USA. 

Comment on this post below.