Word.ws English Dictionary

rain like cats and dogs

rain like cats and dogs is the alternative form of rain cats and dogs.

Meaning of rain cats and dogs

Verb

rain cats and dogs (third-person singular simple present rains cats and dogs, present participle raining cats and dogs, simple past and past participle rained cats and dogs)

  1. (idiomatic, impersonal) To rain very heavily.
    • ["]Those weather-gaws aren't out for nothing. It'll rain cats and dogs to-morrow." Marigold wondered what weather-gaws were—and then forgot in thinking how interesting it would be in it really rained cats and dogs. Little silk-eared kittens everywhere by the basketful—loads of darling pudgy puppies.1929, L[ucy] M[aud] Montgomery, “Marigold Entertains”, in Magic for Marigold, Toronto, Ont.: McClelland and Stewart, →OCLC, section 4, page 190

Forms of rain like cats and dogs

third-person singular presentrains like cats and dogs
present participleraining like cats and dogs
past participlerained like cats and dogs
pastrained like cats and dogs

Questions about rain like cats and dogs

What is rain like cats and dogs the alternative form of?
Rain like cats and dogs is the alternative form of rain cats and dogs.

Words near rain like cats and dogs in the dictionary

  1. rain hellfire
  2. rain lamp
  3. rain lamps
  4. rain leaf
  5. rain leaves
  6. rain like cats and dogs
  7. rain lilies
  8. rain lily
  9. rain man
  10. rain men
  11. rain moon

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rain like cats and dogs (page history and authors); rain cats and dogs (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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