A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
sunshower
A sunshower is rain falling while the sun is shining, produced either by a small shower cloud with clear sky around it or by rain being carried sideways by wind from a cloud some distance away. It is the standard condition for a rainbow, since a bow requires sun behind the observer and rain in front, so a sunshower and a rainbow are very nearly the same event described from two directions.
Etymology
The English name is a plain compound. What is remarkable about the phenomenon is the folklore, which is nearly universal and strikingly consistent: Across dozens of unrelated languages, a sunshower is said to be the wedding of an animal, most often a fox. Japan, Korea, and a string of other places have the fox’s wedding; South Africa has a monkey’s wedding; parts of Europe and Africa have a jackal, a hyena, or a wolf.
Notes
Why the same story appears in so many places has never been explained, and the languages involved are too widely separated for simple borrowing to account for it. The English-speaking versions are the devil beating his wife and the devil kissing his wife, which is grimmer and less widespread. Serein is the related case of rain from an apparently clear sky at night.