raining

Pluralrainings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of rain.

   Heavy clouds gathered before it started raining over the valley.

   By dawn it was still raining steadily along the coast.

   Note

   The -ing form does two jobs. After be it builds the progressive (it was raining all night), and as a gerund it fills a noun slot (raining spoiled the picnic). The weather use takes the empty it as its subject. Figurative uses take real subjects instead: ash raining down, or a crowd raining insults on someone. Unlike the countable noun, the gerund has no plural.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   An occasion of rain falling; a single fall of rain.

   A brief raining left the streets glistening under the lamplight.

   Farmers prayed for a good raining to break the long summer drought.

   Similarshower, rainfall, downpour, soaking

   Note

   A count noun made from the verb, and its plural shows it: rainings are individual episodes of rain, each one counted as a separate event. Philosophers of language use the word when they treat weather as a happening. Maite Ezcurdia and Robert J. Stainton's The Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary in Philosophy (2013) describes rainings as a kind of change that places undergo.

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