Why Do We Say ‘ It’s Raining Cats and Dogs’?

The curious history of an even curiouser phrase

Paul Thomas Zenki
ILLUMINATION-Curated
4 min readFeb 22, 2022

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Cartoon of a person walking beneath an umbrella while cats and dogs fall from a cloud
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors

It’s raining cats and dogs. A common enough phrase.

Makes not the first lick of sense, though. So why do we say it?

Well, there are several folk etymologies floating around, including these from the Library of Congress website:

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Paul Thomas Zenki
ILLUMINATION-Curated

Ghost writer, essayist, marketer, Zen Buddhist, academic refugee, living in Athens GA, blogging at A Quiet Normal Life: https://www.quietnormal.com/