Learning Objective: At the end of the session, the students are expected to be able to use the different words related to weather.



Alexander from Russia asks:


What is the difference between rainy and showery?





Catherine Chapman of bbc.com answers:


Let’s look at the two adjectives that you’ve asked about

– that’s rainy and showery.


When we say something like, "It’s a very rainy day today",


we mean it’s raining a lot – probably for most of the day, with only the odd break here and there in the rain, or maybe no breaks at all.





But when we describe the weather as showery, what we mean is that usually it rains for a while, then it stops raining for a while and then it starts again and off-and-on rain through the day.



When we talk about the whether in English, we generally use a mixture of adjectives and nouns and we have a few standard expressions as well.

Here are some more words and expressions related to wet weather:


drizzle (n) / drizzly (adj)

very soft, light rain, which usually continues for a long time


pouring (adj)

raining very heavily


sleet (n)

freezing rain; a mixture of rain and snow together


It’s chucking it down!

It’s raining really heavily.


Nice weather for ducks!

It’s raining very heavily.





Now here’s some vocabulary for hot weather:


boiling (adj)

very hot


sweltering (adj)

very hot


scorching (adj) / a scorcher (n)

extremely hot


a heatwave (n)

a period of extremely hot and dry weather that lasts for several days or even weeks