Why do we say "It's raining cats and dogs"?

Meaning:

It's raining unusually hard.

Background:

This is one of those phrases that has many potential origins, and no one is really sure which is correct.

First, it goes without saying that the phrase was never intended to be literal. Every now and then someone suggests a storm event, like a tornado or hurricane, scooped up pets as it passed through and deposited them elsewhere, but there’s no record of this happening on a scale large enough to spawn the idiom.

A common misconception – sparked by a chain email in 1999 with the subject line “Life in the 1500s” – is that in the 1500s pets took shelter in the thatched roofs of the day. When it rained excessively, the roofs would leak and they would fall off the slick material, thereby “raining cats and dogs” inside the dwelling. While the thatch could house bugs and small animals like mice, larger pets never took up residence there. Snopes.com wrote an article shortly after the email was published debunking its contents.

Some believe “it’s raining cats and dogs” has its beginnings in Norse mythology. Odin, the god of wind, was often seen with wolves or dogs , so these animals likewise became associated with strong gales. Witches were often depicted with black cats, and sailors came to associate them with rain. Raining cats and dogs, therefore, may have arisen when superstitious folk were subjected to a storm so severe it seemed supernatural in origin.

Another possibility is that the saying derives from an old English word for waterfall (catadupe), which means cataract or waterfall. “Catadupe” sounds enough like cats and dogs that some feel the phrase may be a corruption of the word – evidence of consonant shift over centuries. In this case, it would mean rain coming down in sheets of water, like a waterfall.

Finally, the idiom may come from an old Greek expression, cata doxa, meaning “beyond belief” – so the rain was so intense it was beyond belief.

There’s no proof that any of these sparked the saying, but there’s also nothing to disprove any of the theories.

More certain is the literary origin of “It’s raining cats and dogs.” A similar phrase first appears in Welsh poet Henry Vaughan’s 1647 work, Olor Iscanus (“The Swan of Usk”). In it, he referred to a secure roof as being impervious to “dogs and cats rained in shower.” A few years later, in 1653, Richard Brome’s comedy, The City Wit, or the Woman Wears Breeches, uses a similar phrase. In Act IV, one of the characters rails:

I will now bring a most strong and poetical execration upon the Universe
From henceforth … the world shall flow with dunces,
And it shall rain dogs and polecats and so forth.

The first appearance of the saying as we know it came from Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, who used the imagery several times in his works, beginning with his 1710 poem, “"A Discription of a City Shower".” In it, he describes London’s River Fleet, which functioned as an open sewer running through the heart of the city. When it rained hard, the river flooded, sending effluvia coursing down the streets (including the bodies of dead cats and dogs):

Sweeping from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,
Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud,
Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.

The saying “raining cats and dogs” gained popularity after the publication of Swift’s Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversations (1738), which poked fun at the upper class. In it, one character states he is certain another gentleman will attend a function “though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs.”

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