Where does it raining cats and dogs come from?
Probably the most common reference of this phenomenon in culture is the expression raining cats and dogs that describes copious rains. This sentence appeared first in Jonathan Swift’s work A Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation, but its origin is unknown. An explanation suggests that the expression is a distortion of the French word catadoupe. Another goes back to the Middle Ages, when sanitary conditions were less strict than nowadays and dead cats and dogs left in the street were flushed away during big rains.
