I like English, literature and grammar. I always liked learning about idioms and phrases when I was in English class. However, I certainly never learned about all the phrases that are in common use and I still use some today that make me wonder about the origins of the phrases.
I know that “raining cats and dogs” means that it is pouring rain. The phrase leads to the great joke, “What happened to the man when it was raining cats and dogs? He stepped in a poodle.” I can remember that my mom had a shirt where it was drawn as if it were really raining cats and dogs. I think every cat and dog had a colorful umbrella, too. I liked that shirt. While I knew the phrase was not literal and knew the meaning, I have never known the origin of the phrase. Of course, I decided to research this because I wanted to know the origin.
Many people seem to think that this phrase originated because of animals that got swept away with strong winds and would then fall from the sky. While the animals were things such as small frogs and snails, they decided to say cats and dogs. However, this is not true.
Then, another of the most common thoughts is that it is because dogs and cats lived in thatched roofs so they could stay warm. When it rained, the cats and dogs would fall out of the roof or off of the roof. This is not true either. This thought is spread from an e-mail called “Life in the 1500s.” While that e-mail is a fun read, it is full fallacies.
Then, some people seem to think it comes from the French word, “catadoupe,” meaning “waterfall.” However, there are no sources of this and there is not a French word that is “dogadoupe.”
The phrase also has nothing to do with the phrase,”raining cats and dogs.”
Instead, it seems that the phrase has to do with unsanitary conditions in the 1600s and 1700s.
In a 1710 publication of Tatler magazine, Jonathan Swift’s poem, A Description of a City Shower was published in which appears “Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud,
Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.”
Richard Brome used the phrase “raine Dogs and Polecats” in his 1653 comedy, The City Wit or the Woman Wears the Breeches when referring to bad weather.
While cats and polecats are not in the same family of animal, they are very close linguistically.
The unsanitary conditions of those times meant that the carcasses of dead animals, included cats and dogs, would be carried in the water flowing in the city streets.
Then, in 1738, Jonathan Swift did use the phrase “rain cats and dogs” in A Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation. Being that he had written about the carcasses of the animals flowing in the streets earlier gives this origin of the phrase plausibility.
Source:
Martin, Gary. “Raining cats and dogs”. The Phrase Finder. February 18, 2010 http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/raining%20cats%20and%20dogs.html>.
