Rain

Whether rain is good news depends entirely on where you are standing, and the naming shows it more clearly than almost any other concept in this Atlas.

In the arid and semi-arid traditions — Arabic, Persian, the Sahel, much of Central Asia — rain-names are unambiguously names of blessing. Arabic ghayth means rain specifically in the sense of relief, the rain that ends a drought, and it is a distinct word from ordinary maṭar. That distinction does not exist in English, and it is the reason a rain-name in Arabic reads quite differently from one in, say, Irish.

South Asia has the monsoon, which is not weather so much as a calendar. Sanskrit varṣā names the rainy season, and the entire classical poetic tradition treats its arrival as the season of reunion and longing — the point in the year when travellers came home. Names built on it carry that literature with them.

Yoruba and Igbo naming includes children named for the rain that fell at their birth, which belongs to the wider West African practice of naming for circumstance rather than for quality.

In the wetter parts of Europe, rain barely features in naming at all — and where it does, it tends to be about the freshness after it rather than the rain itself. That absence is as informative as the abundance elsewhere.