As a nation that ‘enjoys’ its fair share of the rain, at least we’ve embraced April showers with various terms for the many and varying types of rain, and some rather specific regional words, too. Here are just a few of our favourites from across the country.
Bange (East Anglia) - dampness in the air
Damping (Midlands) - generally pretty wet
Bouncing off the ground (Lancashire) - raining so hard it’s bouncing back
Degging (Northumberland) - sprinkling or moistening
Dibble (Shropshire) - slow rain drops
Dringey (Norfolk) - light rainfall
Hadder (Cumbria) - from ‘heather’, a feathery, light rain
Harle (Lincolnshire) - drizzle from the sea
Hi’n brwr hen wraegedd affyn (Wales) - meaning ‘it’s raining old women and sticks’
Letty (Somerset) - enough rain to make outdoor work hard. From the old English let, meaning to disallow
Mizzle (Devon and Cornwall) - might sound like a portmanteau of misty and drizzle and it does mean ‘a misty drizzle’ but likely derives from the Dutch miezelen
Picking (Wales) - from pigan meaning ‘starting to rain’
Pleasure and pain (Cockney) - rhyming slang
Plodging through the clart (Northumberland) - so wet you’re wading through mud
Raining forks tiyunsdown’ards (Lincolnshire) - very hard, painful rain, raining like pitchforks
Smirr (Scotland) - a drifting, fine rain
Smithering (Suffolk) - drizzling
Wet rain (Northern Ireland) - that soft, sheeting rain that gets into everything
Our dialect words for rain were inspired by our feature, All Weather Friend from our April issue, which is an extract from In All Weathers: A Journey Through Rain, Fog, Wind, Ice And Everything In Between by Matt Gaw (Elliott & Thompson).
Buy this month's The Simple Things - buy, download or subscribe
