rain cats and dogs

Idioms  

1. Also, rain buckets. Rain very heavily, as in It was raining cats and dogs so I couldn't walk to the store, or It's been raining buckets all day. The precise allusion in the first term, which dates from the mid-1600s, has been lost, but it probably refers to gutters overflowing with debris that included sewage, garbage, and dead animals. Richard Brome used a version of this idiom in his play The City Wit (c. 1652), where a character pretending a knowledge of Latin translates wholly by ear, “Regna bitque /and it shall rain, Dogmata Polla Sophon /dogs and polecats and so forth.” The variant presumably alludes to rain heavy enough to fill pails.

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Example Sentences

It didn’t rain cats and dogs; it rained cows and horses … lions and tigers … boy, it rained elephants and giraffes!

From "The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs" by Betty G. Birney

"But it'll perhaps rain cats and dogs to-morrow, as it did yesterday, and then you can't go," said Godfrey, hardly knowing whether he wished for that obstacle or not.

From Silas Marner by Eliot, George

"It's bound to rain cats and dogs before you get to the trolley."

From Her Weight in Gold by McCutcheon, George Barr

It might rain "cats and dogs," rheumatism and pneumonia might hang out danger signals, but they cared not a whit.

From Bert Wilson on the Gridiron by Duffield, J. W.

How it doth fare with a man on whom evil fortune doth rain cats and dogs Chap. xxi.:

From The Adventurous Simplicissimus being the description of the Life of a Strange vagabond named Melchior Sternfels von Fuchshaim by Grimmelshausen, Hans Jacob Christoph von