I wish I had a dollar for every time someone asked me why we say ‘Raining cats and dogs’. (Come to think of it, since I get paid to do language journalism I probably do have a dollar for every time I’ve been asked that!).

All it means (as everyone knows) is that there has been a heavy rainstorm. So, where do the small animals come into it? The Oxford English Dictionary says that it is first recorded (with any certainty) from 1661. And that date is significant. At that period in England gutters were not the neatly constructed channels at the sides of streets we know today – back then there was one gutter in each street, and it was (very often) a large drain running down the middle of the street. Also back in those days there was a large population of stray animals in any city or town of any size. A heavy rainstorm would result in the bodies of dead strays being washed down the large drain in the middle of the street – so ‘it’s been raining cats and dogs’ started as a joke about where those small dead bodies had come from. Not a very good joke, I agree, but a joke, nonetheless. In 1710 Jonathan Swift wrote a poem called ‘A Description of a City Shower’ which contained these lines:

Sweeping from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood;
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats, and turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood.

That, I think, is a contemporary observation of exactly what I am saying. Now, there are some other proposed explanations of ‘raining cats and dogs’ (that it might come from mythological beliefs that these small animals had a mystical control over storms). But that looks far-fetched to me, and I am sticking to my explanation (which makes much more sense).

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