Welcome back to the Learn English podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
My name is Dr. C and I am a TESL -certified English teacher.
I teach English online to people who are learning it as a second language.
I created this podcast with the goal of it becoming a resource for you to help you with your fluency, vocabulary, and knowledge of American culture.
On today's episode, I would like to discuss the vocabulary aspect.
It is January and in the northern hemisphere, that means it is winter time.
Now, where I live in Southern California, it doesn't really rain that much.
Every day is sunny.
Well, pretty much every day.
A few times we do get some rain, but it's not very common.
However, if you live in other parts of the northern hemisphere, it's probably winter time and it might even be raining.
So today, I want to focus on the different words you can say instead of rain.
Now, of course, if it is raining outside, you can just say that it's raining.
But there's so many other ways to express that.
There's so many other words that you can use that have little differences in their meaning.
Today, I want to give you these words and phrases that you can use so that you can better describe the rain that you see when it is raining outside.
With that, let's begin.
As a reminder, if you look in the description of this podcast episode or our previous podcast episodes, you will find a vocabulary list.
I make this list for every episode so you can get the definitions of the main words and phrases that we say in each episode.
I would suggest looking it over and seeing if you're familiar with any of the terms.
Reminders that you can take these words and put them into whatever system you're using to learn vocabulary, whether it's Anki, Link, Handwritten Flashcards, or whatever system you're using.
Now, let's talk about our first word to describe the rain.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to go in order of increasing intensity.
We're going to start out with the words that are used when there is very light rain, just a little tiny bit.
And each word is going to get a little bit more and more intense.
So we're going to finish with the words that means that it's raining the hardest.
Our first term is going to be sprinkling.
Now, sprinkling is when it is just barely raining.
If you're standing in one spot, you're only going to get a few drops of rain on you, hardly anything at all.
You're barely even going to get wet.
Think of a sprinkler to help you remember this.
A sprinkler is something that's in a yard.
It helps water the grass and the plants, or it's something that's on the ceiling to help in case of a fire and put out a fire.
Now, when we're talking about a sprinkler, it doesn't give off that much water.
It does give off water, but not a ton of water.
And that's where that term sprinkling comes from.
Yes, there's water coming down.
Yes, it's raining, but it's just sprinkling and you don't really need an umbrella.
You don't even really need a hood because it's not that much water.
The next step up is going to be drizzling.
If it's raining a little bit harder, then we would describe it as a drizzle.
With both of these words, sprinkling, drizzling, when you're describing what you're seeing, you're going to say, it's sprinkling, it's drizzling.
So always that it's part.
You can also expand the phrase and say, it's drizzling outside.
That would work, but you can even just shorten it and say it's drizzling.
Drizzle is, if you're standing outside in the same spot, now you're going to get a few more drops of water.
Again, you're still not going to get soaking wet.
You may or may not need to have a hood or an umbrella, but it's, again, not that much water.
There won't be any flooding.
There won't be any damage to any property.
It's just a little bit of rain.
Our next step up would be light rain.
If this is occurring, it's a little bit more than a drizzle.
And you would say it's lightly raining or it's lightly raining outside.
Now in this case, this means that you would want to use a hood or an umbrella.
You would want to have some type of coverage from the rain.
Again, still not really getting any flooding, not getting any damage.
It's just rain, and it's not raining that intensely.
So that's why we say it's lightly raining.
You could also say it's barely raining.
In any of these cases, it's barely raining means there's hardly any at all.
There's very, very little.
It's hardly raining.
It's barely raining.
It's lightly raining.
All of those are going to describe scenarios where, yes, there is moisture.
Yes, there is rain, but it's nothing that's really more than just a nuisance.
It's not really causing any type of flooding.
Eh, you may or may not need an umbrella.
It's just a little bit of rain.
Then, of course, you get to actual rain, and it depends how intense that rain is.
That'll determine what other adjectives you can use.
So of course, you can say it's raining outside.
Following that same structure that we've been talking about, it's raining outside.
If it's raining constantly, if there's constant rain and not really a break in the rain, then you can use a very fancy, high -level vocabulary word, and you can say incessant rain.
You might hear this term on the news if you're watching our weather report.
They might talk about constant rain, and they might say incessant.
Incestant, I know is a little bit tricky to say, but if you can master it, it really elevates your vocabulary.
And what that word means is that something is constant without stopping.
It keeps going. So incessant rain would mean that the rain has been going on for hours, and there is no break in, and it just keeps going.
That's not really telling you how hard or how light it's raining, but it's telling you the duration of time.
Incestant rain, raining for a long period of time.
Incestant can also be used with other things.
So let's say if you're hungry all the time or like my dog, my dog is hungry all the time, I would say she has incessant hunger.
She's incessantly hungry.
Or let's say you're tired even after you sleep, and you're just having this exhaustion.
You're so tired all the time.
This incessant tiredness, just something that continually keeps going no matter what happens.
It just is constant.
If we're trying to describe more intense rain, but rain that only lasts for a short period of time, but is very intense in that period of time, there's a couple different phrases we could use.
The first one, I would say is the one that's most common where I live in California.
What we would say is that we have a downpour.
Now this is going to change from the basic structure that we've been talking about, up until now we've been saying it's sprinkling, it's drizzling, it's raining.
This one, you could say it's downpouring, but I haven't really heard people say that.
That sounds a little bit awkward, at least to me.
What I normally hear is there's a downpour.
There's a downpour, or it's a downpour.
It's a downpour. So we're not saying the verb tense, but we're saying it's a downpour instead of it's downpouring.
So it's a downpour, or there's a downpour outside.
What that means is that you have a very, very intense amount of rain.
Think of when you're pouring water from a pitcher or from a container.
There's a lot of water that's coming out, and that's what this is referring to.
A downpour, a lot of rain that's coming down all at one time.
Again, what this usually is also referring to is a very short amount of time, maybe 10 or 20 minutes, and then it clears up, as we would say.
So clears up means that the rain stops, and you're not having that heavy rain anymore.
When you hear that clears up, that's what that means.
With a downpour, if you're watching on the news, you might see this when they're saying the threat of a downpour, don't get caught out in a downpour.
Something along those lines, that's what they're referring to is this period of intense rain.
With it also comes the risk of flash floods, which is kind of common where I live, or especially more towards the desert.
When you live in a desert environment, and there's a lot of rain at one time, the environment isn't really designed or situated to absorb all that water at once, and so you get this risk of flooding that happens very quickly.
That's what flash floods are.
Everything is fine, everything is dry and safe, and then all of a sudden you have this massive amount of water from this downpour, and all of the roads flood, and it becomes a dangerous situation to get caught out in.
Another way to talk about a downpour is at Deluge.
Another word that's pretty fun to say, like incessant.
So Deluge is dealing with this intense rain, this intense downpour.
I haven't really heard that.
I mean, I have heard it, but it's not very common.
I don't really hear people say that because it is kind of a funny word to say.
It's a little bit harder to pronounce, so I would say it's not as common as saying downpour.
But another way to say it is a cloud burst.
Cloud burst is, again, try to imagine what this would look like.
If you have a cloud and it just popped, all of a sudden if it just burst open, all of the moisture that's in it just came out all at one time, that would be a cloud burst.
And that's what this situation is.
A cloud burst, again, a sudden downpour, a sudden amount of a lot of rain all at one time.
If it's raining very, very hard, but it is not a downpour, it doesn't occur in a short amount of time, it occurs over a longer period of time, then we could just say that it's pouring.
It's pouring outside.
It's pouring means, again, think of a picture pouring water, or a container pouring water, a lot of water.
Downpour is short and intense.
Pouring just means a lot of water.
Intense doesn't have that shortness aspect to it.
Another way to say that it's raining a lot, that it's pouring, you can also say probably one of my favorite idioms when it comes to rain, and that is that it's raining cats and dogs outside.
We are definitely not saying that any animals are falling from the sky.
There are no cats or no dogs that are falling from clouds, to be honest.
I'm not really sure where this idiom comes from.
I don't know why we say it, but when it is raining very, very hard, when there's a lot of rain, you will hear people say it's raining cats and dogs, or it's raining cats and dogs outside.
Again, this doesn't have to do with a time limit.
It just means that you have this very heavy rain.
When we're talking about rain that continues on and is kind of constant with the rain that's coming down, you can also call them constant showers.
So rain gets called a shower.
Think of when you're taking a shower, for example, in the bathroom, and think of the shower head, how you have that water coming out.
So when it's raining outside, you'll hear it on the weather report.
You'll hear people say there's a chance of showers tomorrow, which means a chance of rain.
Not talking about people showering, it's talking about rain.
You can also hear light showers, which means light rain or constant showers, which I think is probably what they, I hear personally a lot on the news.
Constant showers means constant rain.
Again, rain that does not have very many breaks in it, and it just keeps falling all day and you're just getting a lot of rain that's pouring down.
The other idiom that you'll hear is that it's raining buckets.
So think of a bucket and how much water you could fill in there and then transfer that into this idiom.
So let's say that you have a lot of rain outside.
Again, it doesn't have to be for a very short period of time.
It could be for any period of time, and it's just a heavy, large amount of rain.
You would say it's raining buckets outside.
Think of someone pouring buckets of water onto the street.
So if it's raining buckets, you're really getting a lot of rain, probably getting some flooding, getting some dangerous conditions that you wouldn't want to be outside in.
If you get caught walking while it's raining buckets or while it's raining cats and dogs, you're really going to get soaked and just have a lot of water on you if you do get caught out in that rain.
The last term that we're going to talk about is torrential rain.
Now, torrential rain is when you're associating it with a storm.
So torrential rain would be with a monsoon for places that have monsoon season or here in the United States with hurricanes.
Torrential rain is what comes with those hurricanes or monsoons.
So when you have this big storm with all this wind, you get torrential rains.
Torrential rains definitely can be dangerous.
This is what causes flooding and damage to properties and down trees and power lines, and you wouldn't want to be in torrential rain.
So when you hear this on the weather report, on the news, when they're talking about a storm that's coming in, you'll hear this is torrential showers for tomorrow or torrential rain for tomorrow.
And that would mean that it's going to rain very, very heavily.
I hope you enjoyed this episode and learned a little bit about these words and phrases.
Again, a reminder to check out the vocabulary that's in the description.
And these are listed in that vocabulary list.
Add them to your system.
Make flashcards, use Anki, use whatever you have, just so you can start incorporating them into your vocabulary and start using them in conversation.
You'll also be able to understand a native speaker when they're talking to you and know the difference between it's raining buckets and it's barely even sprinkling.
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