Vocal Voices

The BBC is running an article on regional descriptions for weather.

Many of them are fairly familiar, such as it raing "cats and dogs" or "stair rods" or "howling a gale", but others are lot less well known.

Being ex RAF I lived all over the UK so things such as "nesh" or it being "a bit dark over Bill's mother's" although local, I understand. We have a few up here: "The rain in Leeds falls mainly on the weeds" and it's "siling it down" spring to mind.

Do you lot have any to add?

"A fine soft day" is often the Irish equivalent of "coming down in stair rods"

Well it rains so much here that they wrote a nursery rhyme about it, so my names for rain are unprintable

I can think of several expressions concerning the weather that were used in my old home town,
but none are suitable for putting on a respectable website such as Vocal Voices.

I must be a bit prim and proper when it comes to describing weather.

The worst I can think of is pi55ing it down. I would dearly love to know what your unprintable ones are.

Workingman wrote:I must be a bit prim and proper when it comes to describing weather.

The worst I can think of is pi55ing it down. I would dearly love to know what your unprintable ones are.

Same here... my worst would probably be that it's f**** chucking it down

Some people around Huddersfield call a freezing day a nithering day. Some older people used to call an icy wind a lazy wind (because it went straight through you without bothering to go round you).

My favourite is "blowing a hooley" for a gale.

Oh, and do the Scots call a drizzly day "dreich"?

Interestingly, I can't actually think of any particular "West Midlands" dialect phrases for the weather ......

Me neither Ossie...maybe "it's 'ommering it down"? (It's hammering it down...or it's raining rather heavily).

Yes dreich is right cromwell, I worked in Fleet but the rest of the team was in Glasgow, it took me a long time to get used to the accent and the language