This Friday is the first official day of spring.  The coming of spring means warmer weather, pretty flowers, spring sports, and pollen.  Spring also means storms.  If it’s raining particularly hard, we might say that it is ‘raining cats and dogs’.  How did such a colorful and obviously exaggerated saying come to represent a hard rain?

The idiom is far older than I would have thought.  In 1651, British poet Henry Vaughn wrote in a collection of poems that “dogs and cats rained in shower.”  In 1652, British playwright Richard Brome wrote in his play City Witt, “It shall rain dogs and polecats.”  In 1738, author Jonathan Swift published the phrase as we know it today, with one of his characters fearing that it would “rain cats and dogs.”

While the publication of the idiom is well-documented, its origin is a bit of a mystery.  One very popular but debunked theory is that cats and dogs would bed down in the thatching of roofs.  When the rain came down hard, it would drive the animals out of their hiding spots.  The rain made the roof slippery, and the animals would slide off, making it appear to be raining cats and dogs.

One possible origin is that an older word or phrase was misheard or mispronounced.  The Old English word for “waterfall” is catadupe.  The phrase could have originally literally meant that it was raining waterfalls.  Another Greek expression is cata doxa, meaning “contrary to experience or belief.”  So, the phrase might have initially meant you couldn’t believe how hard it was raining.

A third, and far more gruesome, potential origin is far more literal.  The streets of England in the 17th century had open gutters and were prone to flooding.  Hard rains would wash out the gutters and turn the streets into temporary rivers.  Dead animals in the gutters and those that were drowned in the flooding would wash down the street, making it appear to anyone looking that it had rained cats and dogs.

Whether it comes from a misheard phrase or poorly maintained streets, the phrase has survived for hundreds of years.  While we deal with the torrential rains and flooding of spring, I am grateful that it doesn’t actually rain cats and dogs.

Crystal Kelly is a feature writer for Bizarre Bytes with those unusual facts that you only need to know for Trivial Pursuit, Jeopardy, or to stump your in-laws.

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