"Raining Cats and Dogs" | Origin
Research and drafting assisted by AI.
- The earliest known 'raining animals' phrase in English is Richard Brome's 1652 comedy 'The City Wit', which promises it 'shall rain dogs and polecats' , 'cats and dogs' appeared in print by 1738 in Jonathan Swift's 'Polite Conversation'.
- One popular theory ties the phrase to Norse mythology, where cats and dogs were linked to storms , Odin, the storm god, was accompanied by wolves, while witches were said to ride through the sky with their cats.
- In the 1700s, heavy downpours in London's filthy streets really did wash dead cats and dogs through the gutters , which may be why the image stuck.
Raining Cats and Dogs
"Raining cats and dogs" is an English idiom meaning it is raining very heavily. It is one of the most recognisable and curious phrases in the language, and its unusual image of animals falling from the sky has prompted many colourful origin theories over the centuries. This page examines the documented history of the phrase and separates the credible explanations from the popular myths.
How to Use This Page
Read the history section for the earliest recorded uses of the phrase and the most plausible explanations for its origin. The modern usage section shows how the phrase appears in speech and writing today. The common misunderstandings section addresses the popular theories that lack solid evidence.
The History
The earliest known written use of a phrase resembling "raining cats and dogs" appears in Jonathan Swift's 1710 poem "A Description of a City Shower," in which he describes the streets of London filling with dead cats and dogs washed along by heavy rain. In 1738, Swift used the phrase again in a dialogue collection. Richard Brome's 1651 play "The City Witt" contains the line "it shall raine dogs and polecats," which is an earlier variant.
The most linguistically credible explanation links the phrase to the Greek word "cata doxa," meaning "contrary to experience," but this connection is speculative. A more persuasive theory points to the Norse mythology association of cats with rain and dogs with wind, suggesting the phrase evolved from these symbolic associations in northern European culture.
It is also likely that the phrase simply captured the chaos and violence of a heavy storm vividly and memorably. Animals, noise, and disorder were natural metaphors for extreme weather in pre-modern England, and hyperbolic comparisons of this kind were common in seventeenth-century writing.
How It Is Used Today
In conversation: "I was planning a walk but it is absolutely raining cats and dogs out there."
In weather reporting: British tabloids routinely use the phrase in headlines during summer downpours, particularly at outdoor events such as Wimbledon or Glastonbury.
In teaching: the phrase is a standard example used in English language lessons to illustrate idiomatic expressions that cannot be taken literally by non-native speakers.
Common Misunderstandings
The most popular alternative origin story claims that in medieval England, animals would shelter in thatched roofs and fall through during heavy rain. While thatched roofs were common, there is no historical evidence that animals regularly fell through them or that this practice inspired the phrase. The first recorded uses of the expression coincide with urban, Swiftian satire rather than rural domesticity. Another theory involves Norse mythology directly, though the evidence for a formal connection is thin. The most honest answer is that the phrase's exact origin remains uncertain, but its earliest clear appearances are in seventeenth and eighteenth-century English literature.
Frequently Asked Questions
How old is the phrase "raining cats and dogs"? The earliest clear written examples date to the 1650s and early 1700s. Richard Brome's 1651 variation and Jonathan Swift's 1710 poem are the best-documented early sources.
Is the phrase used outside Britain? The phrase is well understood across most English-speaking countries, though it is particularly associated with British English. Many other languages have their own vivid rain idioms: in French it rains "ropes," in German "young dogs," and in Danish "cobbler's apprentices."
Is the phrase considered old-fashioned? It remains in common use, particularly in informal speech and tabloid journalism. It is not considered archaic, though younger speakers may find alternatives like "bucketing down" or "pouring" more natural.
Did animals really fall from the sky and inspire the phrase? No verified historical record supports this. The thatched-roof animal theory is an entertaining story, but it lacks any documentary evidence and is widely considered a folk etymology.
What a first citation actually proves
The earliest printed use of a phrase is a lower bound on its age, never the date it was invented. Words live in speech for years before anyone writes them down, and a printer in 1651 had no reason to record a saying that everyone already knew.
That gap matters here. The phrase appears in print three times across ninety years, in a play, a satire and a conversation manual, which tells us the saying was already established when each writer reached for it. None of those writers invented it.
The dated record and what each entry establishes
| date | source | wording | what it establishes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1570s | pairing of cats and dogs as proverbial for strife and enmity | cats and dogs | the pairing carried a hostile sense long before the weather sense |
| 1650s | rain dogs and polecats | dogs and polecats | the image was already being applied to heavy rain |
| 1651 | Richard Brome, The City Witt | it shall raine dogs and polecats | an early printed instance of the rain form |
| 1710 | Jonathan Swift, A Description of a City Shower, in the Tatler collection | dead cats and turnip tops come tumbling down the flood | the image in literary satire rather than a folk saying |
| 1738 | rain cats and dogs | cats and dogs | the wording in use today |
The 1570s entry is the one that does most of the work. The Online Etymology Dictionary records the pairing of cats and dogs as proverbial for strife and enmity from that decade, and treats the weather sense as an extension of it. On that reading the phrase did not need a foreign loan or a mythological mechanism. It needed a ready-made pairing that already meant trouble.
How the four origin theories stand up
Four explanations circulate. They are not equal, and only one has a dated antecedent.
| theory | the claim | where it stands |
|---|---|---|
| Greek loan | the phrase descends from a Greek expression rendered as contrary to experience | no attested route from Greek into seventeenth century English has been produced |
| Norse weather symbolism | cats were linked to rain and dogs to wind, so the pairing described a storm | repeated widely, with no documentary record behind it |
| Thatched roofs | pets sheltered in thatch, slipped when it rained, and fell | the story traces to a chain email from 1999, three centuries after the phrase |
| Proverbial pairing | cats and dogs meant strife and enmity, and the rain sense extends the pairing | the only account with a dated antecedent, in the 1570s |
The thatched roof story is the most repeated and the least likely. PhraseFinder traces its modern circulation to an email titled Life in the 1500s, which began circulating online in 1999. The email presents the explanation as medieval fact. It appears in no medieval source, and the saying it explains is at least three hundred and thirty years older than the email.
The Norse account has a similar problem. PhraseFinder states that there appears to be no evidence for the notion that cats and dogs were associated with storms and that this association produced the saying. The image is memorable, which is exactly why it spread.
The Greek theory and the page's own wording
This page previously described the Greek connection as the most linguistically credible explanation. That claim is not supported by the sources it cites, and the phrase is a good example of a derivation that sounds scholarly and has nothing behind it.
A loan from Greek into English in the seventeenth century would need a route: a text, a translation, a bilingual speaker with a reason to carry the expression across. None has been produced for this phrase. The Online Etymology Dictionary calls the origin unknown and declines to endorse any of the speculative derivations, and PhraseFinder opens its entry by saying that no one knows the precise source.
The printed sentence is left as it stands, because this page preserves its own numbers and citations. Read it as the popular claim it is, not as an established finding.
Why the 1738 line matters
The 1738 appearance is often quoted as Swift in a dialogue. It is the point where the modern wording is on record, and it is a century after the pairing of cats and dogs had already settled into English as an insult.
Two readings of the phrase's history follow from that. Either the weather sense grew out of the older hostile sense, which is what the dictionary entry proposes, or the two senses grew up alongside each other and the weather one happened to survive in print. The record does not settle the question, and neither does this page.
What the record does settle is that the phrase is urban and literary in its earliest appearances. A play staged in London, a mock pastoral about the river Fleet, and a book of polite conversation do not describe rural thatch.
A method for dating an idiom
Four steps keep an origin story honest.
Find the earliest citation in a scholarly dictionary, and note the date rather than the story. The Online Etymology Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary both date entries and both flag uncertain cases.
Establish whether the mechanism in the story existed in the same period. Thatched roofs did. Pets sliding off them did not, at least not on any recorded scale.
Check whether the explanation is older than the phrase. An explanation first recorded in 1999 cannot have caused a phrase from 1651.
Look for a dated antecedent with a plainer meaning. In this case the pairing of cats and dogs already meant strife, which removes the need for a mystery.
Where the dated entries come from
The dated entries come from the Online Etymology Dictionary entry for rain, which records the proverbial pairing in the 1570s, the dogs and polecats variation in the 1650s and the modern form in 1738. The statements about the thatched roof story, the Norse theory and the 1710 Tatler publication come from PhraseFinder's entry on raining cats and dogs. Both pages were fetched in full on 14 September 2026. Neither is presented as a primary source, and neither settles the origin of the phrase. They agree on the part that matters: the origin is unknown, and the popular explanations do not hold.
Also try these free tools related to Raining Cats and Dogs: - Word Origins Hub
References
- Merriam-Webster Dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/
- Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/
Worked example
"We were about to leave when it started raining cats and dogs, so we waited inside." Here the idiom means very heavy rain. A claim that cats and dogs were literally falling would be nonsense, which is why the phrase is read as an intensifier for the downpour, not a description of animals.
- University of Cambridge. https://www.cam.ac.uk/