Learn English – Rain coming/dropping/falling/dripping

vocabulary

Rain drops dripping/coming down/falling/dropping.

Which one is appropriate to describe rain coming down?

And how about these: icecream: ice cream dripping/dropping?
Water dropping/dripping?

Best Answer

I think we usually say, "the rain was falling", or simply, "it was raining".

"Dripping" means a slow, intermittent process. If it was a very light rain, you might say "the rain was dripping". More often we say that a faucet is dripping, meaning that one drop falls every few seconds. Similarly, that water was dripping off the roof, or that you knocked the bottle over and the water was dripping out, etc.

You can say "the rain was coming down". Usually this is used for a very hard rain. "The rain was coming down hard" or "the rain was coming down in sheets".

I don't think I've ever heard someone say "rain was dropping" or "water was dropping". You can "drop" a bottle of water, but we don't normally say that water not in a container dropped. One exception that comes to mind is waterfalls: we say "this waterfall has a fifty foot drop", meaning, that's the distance from the top of the waterfall to the bottom. While we refer to individual units of rain as "rain drops", I don't think I've ever heard someone say, "the rain dropped".

If your ice cream is melting, you might well say, "the ice cream is dripping". If you said "my ice cream dropped", I think people would understand you to mean that the entire bowl or cone fell, not that small amounts of melted ice cream fell.

So to summarize: The common thing to say is, "the rain is falling" or "the rain fell". "My ice cream cone is dripping" or "The faucet is dripping" or "Water is dripping from the faucet".

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