Phrase Origins: Raining Cats and Dogs

I like English, literature and grammar. I always loved learning about idioms and phrases when I was in English class. However, I certainly never learned about all the phrases that are in use, and I still use some today, which makes me wonder about the origins of the words.

I know that “raining cats and dogs means raining. The saying leads to a great joke: “What happens to a man when a cat and was it raining dogs? He went in a poodle.” I remember my mother had a coat where it was drawn as if it really rained cats and dogs. I think every cat and dog had a different umbrella too. which coat did you like. While I knew the phrase was not literal and I knew the meaning, I never knew the origin of the phrase. I decided to investigate this because I wanted to know the origin.

Then the second thought is the most common, because dogs and cats lived on roofs. it was so hot. When it rained, cats and dogs would fall from the roof or roof. This is not true either. This thought is spread by the e-mail “Life in the 1500s”. While this electronic game is readable, it is full of errors.

Hence, as some think, from the French word “catadoupe,” that is, “cataract.” But there are no sources for this and the French word is not “dogadoupe”.

The phrase also has nothing to do with the phrase “raining cats and dogs”.

Instead, it seems that the phrase is dealing with global conditions in the 1600s and 1700s.

In a 1710 publication of the Tatler magazine, Jonathan Swift’s poem, A Description of the City Shower‘s published in which it appears “Puppies Drown’d, Stinking Sprats, all drenched in Mud,
Dead Cats and Rape-Tops slide down the flood.”

Richard Brome used it in his 1653 comedy Rain Dogs and Polecats, The City of Wit or Woman’s Breeches to refer to the weather.

Since cats and dogs are not in the same animal family, they are very closely related.

The insane conditions of those times meant that corpses of dead animals, including cats and dogs, could be transported. water flows into the streets of the city.

Then, in 1738, Jonathan Swift said “rain cats and dogs” in Collection of Political and Witty Conversations. What he had written about the corpses of animals flowing in the streets gives this origin of the true simile.

Source:
Martin, Gary. “cats and dogs”. The phrase Finder. February 18, 2010