Learning English

Introduction

There are lots of different words for rain in English. Learn some in this video with Beth and BBC weather forecaster and presenter Simon King.

1. Comprehension quiz

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2. Vocabulary quiz

Fill the gaps in this quiz to test yourself.

precipitation
a general word for anything wet that falls out of the sky

rainfall
the amount of rain that falls

sleet
a more liquid type of snow

snow
flakes of ice that fall from the sky

hail
hard pellets of ice that fall from the sky

shower
rain that falls for a short period of time

showery rain
a period of showers

spitting
an informal word for light rain

chucking (it) down / bucketing (it) down / pouring (it) down
informal expressions for heavy rain

torrential rain
very heavy rain

drizzle
very light rain

mizzle
very light rain combined with mist

soaking wet
very wet

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript. 

Simon King
Precipitation, rainfall, showers, showery rain,

Beth
spitting, chucking it down, bucketing it down,

Simon King
torrential rain, pouring down, mizzle, drizzle and you're soaked.

Beth
And you get soaking.

Beth
Rain, how do we talk about it? I asked meteorologist and BBC weather presenter, Simon King what words we can use to talk about rain.

There are so many different words for rain in English. 

Simon King
We do use a lot of different words for rain. So, overall we use the word precipitation and that basically means anything that comes out of the clouds, the sky, so that includes rainfall, sleet, snow or hail, so that all encompasses precipitation.

Beth
OK, and there are lots of words when I watch the weather forecast or listen to the weather forecast, loads of different words for rain like shower. You use shower a lot which is a bit confusing because this is a shower so what's going on

Simon King
So, that's quite… It's quite meteorological the difference between rain and showers but the most simple way to describe it is, a shower is something… well, it's rain which may not last all that long so it may just last an hour or so, or we might say showery rain which means that rain is on and off throughout the day whereas rain is when it just rains a lot for a long period of time

Beth
Yeah, and there's also a lot of informal rain words in English so an example of that is spitting.

Simon King
Yes – spitting.  That's light rain, spitting rain, isn't it? Bits and pieces of rain, I guess.

Beth
A small amount.

Simon King
A splatter of rain.

Beth
Yeah, and then we have chucking it down or bucketing it down. Imagine a bucket of water, literally. That's really rainy but I guess you wouldn't say that on the weather forecast.

Simon King
We might say torrential rain. Very occasionally, I might say it's pouring down outside, and that's when we have some really big heavy rain showers, and we can sometimes use those words because it's important to describe the weather as well.

Beth
OK.

Simon King
But the other one, mizzle is a good one

Beth
What is mizzle?

Simon King
So, drizzle is that very fine rain, and it's comprised of very, very small rain droplets. Now, mizzle is a combination of mist and drizzle, and it's when it's really misty but you just feel a little bit of rain on your skin. It gets you soaking wet.

Beth
Yeah, sometimes you look outside and it's like it's not raining, and then you go outside…

Simon King
and you're soaked.

Beth
And you get soaking. Yeah, definitely.

Beth
Well thank you Simon. That was all very interesting, and you have given us some words that we will hear in the weather forecast. Precipitation, you talked about torrential rain which is when it's raining really heavily. But we also talked about some informal words.

Simon King
Yeah, we have the other informal words that you might hear like, pouring it downspitting, bucketing it down

Beth
And raining cats and dogs…

Simon King
Yes.

Beth
…which no one actually says!

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