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HSS Posted 18 years ago
Grammar

Sheet of Rain

Hi.


The glass doors in the room lit up with a streak of brilliant blue light… The thunder rolled… Slick sheets of rain came pouring down, so hard that they were bouncing off the marble floor.. Amidst these sheets of rain, we’d see gusts of wind bringing torrential waves of rain ....
I can't visualize the "sheets." It may be that if you would try to walk through the rain, you would feel like you are breaking through curtains of rain. Is it how you would look at it?

Longman Advanced American Dictionary says a sheet of rain refers to a very large moving mass of it. A mass is geometrically not a plane (sheet). How would you look at it to see a sheet?

Hiro/ Sendai, Japan
  

Top answer

My view: It may be that if you would try to walk through the rain, you would feel like you are breaking through curtains of rain.

— Mister Micawber

  • My view: It may be that if you would try to walk through the rain, you would feel like you are breaking through curtains of rain.
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4 Answers
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My view: It may be that if you would try to walk through the rain, you would feel like you are breaking through curtains of rain.
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Sheets of rain: Think of getting a towel very wet and wringing it out. When rain is coming down in sheets, it is as if there is a steady stream of rain mixed with sheets of rain -- as if amongst the heavy rain, somebody is wringing out a giant wet towel over you, so it comes down very heavily in concentrated areas. These sheets of rain tend to be spaced only seconds apart. It's hard to explain,
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"Sheets" of rain refers to long solid-looking "ropes" of rain. It comes from sailing, where a sheet is the long rope that ties down the corner of a sail. There is a similar use of "sheets" that comes into play when a very drunk person is referred to as being "three sheets to the wind." In that case the person is flat-out drunk, like in a gale with sails and sheets flapping loose, out of control.
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I've been curious about this expression as a tropical meteorologist and I agree that it is a bit of both a figurative and literal description. The latter to me i think it's perhaps due to the nature of tropical rain one experiences here. When extremely heavy rain falls during a tropical thunderstorm, it is often coupled with gusting winds from the associated cumulonimbus cloud above. As a resu

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