raining heavily

[alpacinou]

Hello,

I am looking for a dramatic equivalent for "raining cats and dogs". I want to write down a sentence like this:

And then mother nature became furious. The sky turned gray and it started.....

Obviously, "raining cats and dogs" does not work in that sentence in terms of register. What can I say? I already know verbs like "shower" and "pour" but I'm looking for an idiom.

 

[alpacinou]

I found this example from this page:

https://helloenglish.com/translate/english-hindi-dictionary/meaning-of-deluge-in-Hindi

This is not a native speaker's website. Could native speakers please tell if this sentence is okay?

And then the heavens opened, releasing a 'deluge' of heavy rain that had all three of us scrambling to be the first back in the house.

 

[GoesStation]

It's okay except for the quotation marks. It looks like the web site is incorrectly using single quotes ("inverted commas" in British English) to mark the word it's describing. It should mark them typographically.

The section that contains the quoted sentence is a selection of extracts from literature that demonstrate how the word is used in practice. The site's editors didn't write them.

 

[Matthew Wai]

a 'deluge' of heavy rain

I found "torrential" at Cambridge: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/torrential

● torrential rain
● a torrential downpour/storm

 

[Rover_KE]

Here in the North of England, we say 'The rain's coming down like stair-rods' or 'It's raining stair-rods'.

Is that used anywhere else?

 

[emsr2d2]

Yes, that's used in the south too.

 

[GoesStation]

Here in the North of England, we say 'The rain's coming down like stair-rods' or 'It's raining stair-rods'.

Is that used anywhere else?

It rains buckets or buckets down around here. Stair-rods and other aspects of homebuilding need not apply.

 

[Tdol]

Pelting down

 

[GoesStation]

The skies opened.

 

[emsr2d2]

chucking it down

 

[Rover_KE]

The heavens opened.