Word.ws English Dictionary

rains cats and dogs

rains cats and dogs is the third-person singular simple present indicative 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

Questions about rains cats and dogs

What is rains cats and dogs the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Rains cats and dogs is the third-person singular simple present indicative of rain cats and dogs.

Words near rains cats and dogs in the dictionary

  1. rainproofers
  2. rainproofing
  3. rainproofs
  4. rains
  5. rains buckets
  6. rains cats and dogs
  7. Rains County
  8. rains death
  9. rains death upon
  10. rains dogs and cats
  11. rains down

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rains 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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