regn
regn
Old English
“The word 'rain' has barely changed in a thousand years — Old English regn, Old Norse regn, German Regen — and it may come from a root meaning 'to reach' or 'to stretch out.'”
Old English regn comes from Proto-Germanic *regną, possibly from PIE *Hreg- (to be wet, to rain) or related to a root meaning 'to reach' or 'to extend.' If the 'reaching' etymology is correct, rain is water reaching the ground — a description so simple it borders on philosophy. The word is almost identical across Germanic languages: German Regen, Dutch regen, Swedish regn, Danish regn, Norwegian regn. In a language family where most words have diverged considerably, rain has held its shape. The word resists change the way water resists compression.
Cherrapunji (now Sohra) in Meghalaya, India, holds the record for the most rainfall in a single year: 26,471 millimeters (1,042 inches), recorded in 1860-1861. That is over 26 meters of rain — enough to submerge a four-story building. Mawsynram, a village 15 kilometers from Cherrapunji, now holds the record for highest average annual rainfall. Both towns sit on the southern slope of the Khasi Hills, directly in the path of the Bay of Bengal monsoon. The moisture-laden air rises, cools, and deposits almost everything it carries.
Petrichor — the smell of rain on dry earth — was named by Isabel Bear and Richard Thomas in 1964, from Greek petra (stone) and ichor (the blood of the gods). The smell is caused by oils produced by plants during dry periods, absorbed by clay and rock, and released by raindrops striking the ground. The word for the smell is younger than the smell itself by several billion years. It rained on Earth before there was language, before there were humans, before there were plants. The rain predates everything that names it.
Rain dances are documented in cultures from the Hopi of the American Southwest to the Dinka of South Sudan to the Berbers of North Africa. The practice assumes rain can hear, or that something that controls rain can hear. Whether rain dances work is the wrong question. The right question is why so many cultures independently concluded that rain might listen. The word is older than the science. The ritual is older than the word.
Related Words
Today
The phrase 'rain check' originally meant a ticket allowing readmission to a rained-out baseball game. It now means any deferred acceptance. 'Raining cats and dogs,' 'rain on someone's parade,' 'save for a rainy day,' 'right as rain' — rain is the most metaphorically productive weather word in English, which makes sense: it is the weather most people experience most often.
The Old English word has not changed. Rain is still rain — water falling from clouds, reaching the ground, the most basic form of the water cycle. The word comes from a root meaning 'to reach.' Rain reaches. That is what it does. A thousand years of English, and the word still fits perfectly.
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