Word.ws English Dictionary

rain dance

rain dance noun: a ceremonial dance intended to provoke rain.

rain dance: a ceremonial dance intended to provoke rain
Image: SJasminum, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

rain dance (plural rain dances)

  1. A ceremonial dance intended to provoke rain.
    • The women stripped naked and took part in a rain-dance, a girl being chosen for the sacrificial victim.1936, Rollo Ahmed, The Black Art, London: Long, page 180
  2. (broadly) Any sequence of actions performed in order to provoke rain.
  3. (broadly) Any sequence of arbitrary actions performed in order to achieve a goal.

Forms of rain dance

pluralrain dances

Questions about rain dance

What does rain dance mean?
Rain dance means a ceremonial dance intended to provoke rain.
What part of speech is rain dance?
Rain dance is a noun.
What is the plural of rain dance?
The plural of rain dance is rain dances.

Words near rain dance in the dictionary

  1. rain clouds
  2. rain collar
  3. rain collars
  4. rain crow
  5. rain crows
  6. rain dance
  7. rain dances
  8. rain day
  9. rain days
  10. rain death
  11. rain death upon

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rain dance (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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Cite this entry: “rain dance.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rain_dance. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.