rains

1. 1
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of rain.

   In this region it rains heavily from June through September.

   In the Pacific Northwest, it often rains for days without a break.

   Note

   The weather use needs a subject that refers to nothing: it rains, much as it snows. The figurative uses take real subjects instead. Ash rains down, and a fighter rains blows on an opponent. Older texts hold a trap, because rain was once a spelling of reign. A king who rains over his people is ruling them, not drenching them.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of rain.

   The monsoon rains brought relief after months of drought.

   Farmers depend on the winter rains to water their crops.

   Note

   A plural for a noun that usually does without one. Rain as weather is normally uncountable, so the plural appears when separate falls or spells are being told apart: the spring rains, rains that came late. It also counts the figurative kind, such as rains of ash or of blows. When those spells settle into a fixed yearly season, the word shades into the monsoon sense.

3. 3
   nounplural

   A rainy season, especially the monsoon period of regular heavy rainfall.

   The villagers stocked up on food before the rains began.

   During the rains, the dirt roads become impassable with mud.

   Similarmonsoon

   Note

   A plural that never shrinks to a singular. A single season is still the rains, nearly always with the, and it takes a plural verb: the rains came early. Rudyard Kipling, in Under the Deodars (1889), writes it with a capital, the Rains, and treats the season almost as a proper name, something that arrives on schedule and breeds frogs.

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