GtO 1: It's Raining Cats and Dogs

some conflicts with this answer
i doubt that is where the term arrived from.

REAL ANSWER:

This term originiated in medevil england, where they threw trash in the streets and likewise. But one odd thing they did was throw dead animals on their roofs, thus they could rot and decompose without any smell. But once it rained really hard, the animals slid off their rooves thus giving u the expression, "its raining cats and dogs."

Nice explanation :wink:

Welcome to A2K!

Well, I've not read any posts here except your thread. My guess is:

Like that Chinese folklore described - dragon king was in charge of raining, the folklore in the West might have depicted that rain was controlled by some godness, whose pets were cats and dogs, so that when she was angry, of course her cats and dogs running around and raining hard.

I'll check others' posts later.

THis is NOT the real answer. It comes from a spoof essay called "Life in the 1500s" that has been circulating on the internet for several years. EVERYTHING in it is rubbish, but a frightening number of people believe it and snippets from it crop all over the place in "Did you know that?" - type threads.

You can read a good short debunking of the essay at http://www.snopes.com/language/phrases/1500.htm and a more thorough one at http://historymedren.about.com/library/weekly/aa042202a.htm. Anyone interested in the English language should read these, as it is full of fake word and phrase origins, e.g. "threshold", "dead ringer","raining cats and dogs", "wake", graveyard shift", "trench mouth" and so on. All untrue!

"Life in the 1500s" is the greatest joke about medieval times - if some wouldn't take that rubbish serious. (A little bit thinking about what is written there, should however easily blow of the cover of that joke.)