# Who is getting married when it rains in the sun?

Languages all over the world have a name or a saying for rain that falls while the sun shines, and in more than half of the languages here somebody is up to something. A fox is getting married. The devil is beating his wife. A wolf is giving birth. Here are 796 sayings, from 139 languages, each with the page it was copied from.

## What does your grandmother say?

Pick a language. You get its saying, then three from elsewhere: the one next door, the same story told far away, and a different story altogether.

## 139 languages, one shower

Each dot is a saying found in a dictionary, a folklore collection or a scholar’s article, or, for a smaller share, on a reference site or from an informant. It sits where its source says it was heard. Click a dot to read it and the page it comes from.

A dot is a record, not a census. A language is on the map because someone wrote the saying down and I could open the page; the blank parts are parts nobody searched, or whose sources would not load. A dot drawn as a ring means the source names only a country or a language area, so the dot sits in the middle of it.

## A handful of plots

Sort the sayings by what happens in them and a few plots cover 77% of the records. The plot “The devil’s household” is the biggest, with 184 records in 27 languages; “A plain word” comes next, with 159 records in 72 languages.

## Do the plots follow the language, or the neighbours?

Matti Kuusi, the Finnish folklorist who wrote a 420-page book on this one saying, gathered about 3,000 variants and concluded that the great majority share one family tree. That is how a German reference work, Röhrich’s, reports his 1957 book; I could not open a copy of the book itself.

## How old is it?

The oldest pages I found, by the date of the text, not of the saying. The first page found is a plain word; the first story found is nearly three centuries later, in another language.

## What is actually happening up there?

Meteorologists describe a few set-ups, and none of the sources I rely on says which is commonest (Wikipedia says wind-blown rain “usually”, on the strength of a local radio glossary). Rain can be carried past the edge of its cloud by the wind. A shower cloud can move on or fade while its drops are still falling. And, according to Wikipedia, the sun’s angle can let it shine in under a single shower cloud passing overhead.

Two of those decide how wide the strip is where you get rain and sun together: how far the wind carries a drop while it falls, and how far the low sun reaches in under the cloud’s edge. The calculator adds them. Shower clouds often have their base within a kilometre or two of the ground; near the ground a 2 mm drop falls about 6 m/s.

## In English: the devil and his wife

In the American collections the saying is almost always the same one: the devil is beating his wife. Röhrich says it dominates the whole English-speaking world; the nineteenth-century British folklore collections I found give weather rhymes and fairies instead, though the devil appears in English writers of 1703 and 1738. An older English saying, “cuckolds go to heaven”, is dated 1591. The oldest American record here is from the Carolina mountains in 1889, and a collector in 1896 called it general in the United States.

## Every saying, with its page

796 records. Search by word, language, place or source, or filter by plot. Each row opens on the map, and each source link opens the page the saying was copied from.

## How this was made

- I searched dictionaries, folklore collections, dialect atlases and scholarly articles region by region. Every saying here is copied from a page I could open, and the page is linked. Where a scan was too damaged to quote, the card says so.
- Each record has a tier, shown on its card: dictionary or folklore collection; scholarly study; reference site or secondary compilation, meaning a Wikipedia or Wiktionary page (often the English Wiktionary) or a saying quoted secondhand from a survey such as Hendriks’s; or an informant’s account, mostly from a 1998 survey on the LINGUIST List. {tier_c_n} records rest on the reference tier, the weakest one the test counts; informants’ accounts are left out of the test, and the check that also leaves out the reference tier is shown with it.
- English Wikipedia and listicles gave me leads, not sources (the English Wiktionary is cited, as a reference site). Three lines that circulate as sunshower sayings were left out as jokes or misreadings, without separate checking: “liquid sunshine”, an Argentine “monkey at Mirtha Legrand’s wedding”, and a Vietnamese song credit.
- Where a place is named by the source, the dot is there. Where only a country or a language area is given, the dot is a ring in the middle of it.
- The translations are literal and mine. I could not open a copy of Matti Kuusi’s 1957 book, the main study of this saying; what I say of it comes from two summaries that are named.

Africa, Central Asia, the Pacific and most Indigenous languages are thin, because dictionaries there were hard to reach or not searched. Austrian and Bavarian dialect dictionaries were not searched, and the Swiss one only by a single full-text search; most forms from there come from German reference works. Yiddish, Icelandic, Thai, Burmese and Khmer are missing for the same reason. Silence in this atlas is not proof that nothing is said.

Compiled and written by Marius Comper. Language data: Glottolog (CC BY 4.0). Map: Natural Earth.