plum rains
/ˈplʌm ˈɹeɪnz/
plum rains noun: also occasionally in the singular form plum rain: the East Asian rainy season from early summer to midsummer in the fourth and fifth lunar months (early June to early or mid-July); also, the rain which falls during this season.
Noun
plum rains pl (normally plural, singular plum rain)
- Also occasionally in the singular form plum rain: the East Asian rainy season from early summer to midsummer in the fourth and fifth lunar months (early June to early or mid-July); also, the rain which falls during this season.
- This week the rainy season appears fairly to have set in, and to have found the farmers but ill-prepared for the deluge. The wheat and barley crops were just ripe for the sickle, and in several instances had been cut, but not carried, when the "plum rains," as the Japanese call them, began.1871 October, “Foreign Items”, in Samuel J[ones] Smith, editor, The Siam Repository. Containing a Summary of Asiatic Intelligence, volume 3, number 4, Bangkok: Smith’s Place, →OCLC, page 431, column 1
- The heroes of those thousand years? / Alas! like running water, gone; / Yet still the fever-blast one hears, / And still the plum-rain patters on.1894 January, [anonymous], “Chinese Poetry in English Verse [Thoughts on the View from an Old Tower]”, in Herbert A[llen] Giles, transl., edited by James Knowles, The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly...
Examples of plum rains in a sentence
- In May–June, it may rain for days on end for about a month and is known as the period of "plum rains."1974 August 21, “General Condition of China’s Seaports [Port of Shanghai]”, in [anonymous], transl., Translations on People’s Republic of...
- In the Yangtze River Valley, the rainy period from mid-June to mid-July is the noted Meiyu or Plum Rains.1991 December, Ding Yihui, “The Short-range Fluctuations of Monsoons and Their Association with the Major Weather Events in China”, in...
- We have bad weather in Shanghai leading up to summer, called the plum rains.2000, Carolyn Blackman, “A Lot to Learn: ‘Nowhere Else in the World is It Like This!’”, in China Business: The Rules of the Game, Crows...
Forms of plum rains
| singular | plum rain |
|---|
Origin of plum rains
From plum + rains, either: * a calque of Japanese 梅雨 (ばいう, baiu, “East Asian rainy season”) (梅 (ばい, bai, “Japanese plum or apricot (Prunus mume)”) + 雨 (う, u, “rain; rainy weather”)), from Middle Chinese 梅雨 (mwoj hju^X), a poetic reference to the season when plums grow or ripen; * a calque of Japanese 梅の雨 (うめのあめ, ume no ame, literally “plums’ rain”), from 梅 (うめ, ume) + の (no, possession marker) + 雨 (あめ, ame); or * a calque of Mandarin 梅雨 (méiyǔ, “East Asian rainy season”) (see, for example, the 1894 and 1991 quotations), from 梅 (méi, “Prunus mume”) + 雨 (yǔ, “rain”).
Words that rhyme with plum rains
Questions about plum rains
- What does plum rains mean?
- Plum rains means also occasionally in the singular form plum rain: the East Asian rainy season from early summer to midsummer in the fourth and fifth lunar months (early June to early or mid-July); also, the rain which falls during this season.
- How do you use plum rains in a sentence?
- In May–June, it may rain for days on end for about a month and is known as the period of "plum rains."
- What part of speech is plum rains?
- Plum rains is a noun.
- How do you pronounce plum rains?
- Plum rains is pronounced /ˈplʌm ˈɹeɪnz/ (UK).
Words near plum rains in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: plum rains (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-plum rains.wav.
Cite this entry: “plum rains.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/plum_rains. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.