Raining

How to spell raining

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce raining

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does raining mean?

1. verbFalling as rain; water dropping from the clouds.

Raining in a sentence

• It was raining heavily when the flight finally landed.

• We cancelled the barbecue because it kept raining all afternoon.

Where does raining come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'rain', which descends from the Old English 'regnian' or 'rinan', meaning 'to fall as rain', built on the noun 'regn' (later 'rēn') for the water that falls from the sky. The root is solidly Germanic; close cousins survive in the Dutch 'regen' and the German 'Regen', all tracing back to a shared ancestral word for falling moisture. The spelling settled with the simple 'ai' vowel as English orthography stabilised, and the participle is formed in the regular way by adding '-ing'. The main spelling trap is not the word itself but its sound-alikes: 'raining' (weather), 'reigning' (a monarch ruling, from Latin 'regnare'), and 'reining' (controlling a horse with reins) are pronounced identically yet built from entirely different roots. Keeping the plain 'rain' in view is the surest way to land on the weather word.

How the word is built

• rain (water falling from clouds)
• -ing (present participle suffix)

Words that sound like raining

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• reigning: Currently holding a royal throne, championship, or title.