Number one, I don’t think there’s a word that describes British weather betterthan overcast. This is an adjective that describes when the sky is just covered in cloud. Youcannot see blue sky because there is only cloud. This always reminds me, whenever I fly back into London. I have been probably on holiday or someone sunny and I’ll fly back in and you go through this layer of cloud and you descend through it and you just   think ‘I’m not going to see the sun again for weeks or months.’ And it’s overcast, nothing but cloud. Overcast! Yeah, so British. An example sentence ‘This afternoon it’s going to be overcast.’

Alright let’s look at number two. This is another very British weather word and it’s the first of many words to do with rain. I mean we are talking about British weather here, of course we are going to talk about rain. This word is fantastic ‘drizzle‘ oh that’s a fun one to say ‘drizzle’. So drizzle is light rain, not heavy rain, it’s very light rain. It can also be a verb so ‘Bring your coat it’s drizzling outside.’ It’s raining lightly, a little bit. This is a word we use all the time when talking about rain, you’d describe it as being drizzle or drizzling.

We’ll come back to rain later on but I wanted to get on to a bit of British slang. When we are talking about cold weather some people use a very fun slang term ‘brass monkeys’. So if it’s really cold you could say ‘It’s brass monkeys in here’. It means it’s very cold. It’s brass monkeys. Now that is of course a slang word, so very informal. Don’t use that in your IELTS exam or your business presentation but yeah great word to know.

Another word we use to talk about cold weather is nippy.This is very informal British English slang and it means chilly or cold. So maybe as you are walking to work you go ‘It’s a bit nippy today, isn’t it?’ It’s a bit nippy, it’s a bit cold. We have a lot of slang words for cold. Maybe I should do a whole separate vlog for that. So brass monkeys very cold, nippy cold or chilly.

And we are back straight away with rain words. This is a nice one, a shower. It just means a short period of light rain. So for example ‘This afternoon there will be some light showers.’ And that means there ill be some short period of light rain.

Now that is contrasted with a downpour. This is a sudden burst of heavy rain. So if you get caught in a downpour, you are going to get very very wet. ‘I got caught in a downpour and my shoes are soaking wet.’ So they are very similar ideas, a period of rain. A shower is short and light rain and a downpour is sudden and very heavy rain.

Alright let’s take the word rain itself. Now it can collocate with so so many words. The one that I quite like is torrential rain. Torrential rain is very heavy rain. It’s something that we get a fair bit in Britain, torrential rain. Now other words that we use to describe heavy rain or torrential rain. We could say ‘it’s pouring down’ so ‘it’s pouring down outside’. You could say ‘it’s chucking it down’. ‘It’s bucketing it down.’ Slightly ruder, ‘it’s p*ssing it down.’ That one is a little bit rude, be careful with who you use that with. I use it ‘Oh it’s p*ssing it down outside.’

But it is very very informal. Or you might just say ‘It’s properly raining.’ ‘Have you seen outside? It’s properly raining!’ It means it’s raining heavily. So some great phrases for you to describe heavy rain.

Let’s go back to clouds because in Britain it’s always cloudy. Now sometimes in the summer the sun will come out, you will see the sun and then you’ll see the clouds. And the clouds will move across and obscure the sun, so you can’t see the sun anymore. The verb that we use for this, it’s a phrasal verb. To cloud over. It’s a very sad moment when it clouds over. An example sentence ‘It was really sunny this morning but it’s clouded over now’. As you can see there with all phrasal verbs I’m hanging the tense on the verb so clouded in the past tense but over stays the same, it never changes.

Now it’s not always cold wet weather in Britain. Sometimes we do have hot weather and something that I remember from my childhood is always looking at newspapers and the headline of a newspaper would always say ‘Heatwave coming’ or ‘We are in for a heatwave’. A heatwave is a period of very hot weather or unusually hot weather. Now sometimes in Britain we do get heatwaves where it’s maybe three or four days or a week maybe of really really really extra hot weather. Everyone is super happy when there is a heatwave for maybe the first afternoon and then we start complaining and grumbling about how hot it is, yeah. So an example sentence ‘There is supposed to be a heatwave next week.’ Recently in Britain we’ve had some really strange weather. We are in spring now and yet we had lots of snow over the weekend.

Now when there is lots of snow and it stops you from going out maybe to go to school or to go to work, the roads are covered in snow, transporting stops working, that kind of thing. When that happens we have a phrase ‘to be snowed in’. And that was always quite a magical thing. I remember as a kid. Those days when you had really heavy snow, so that you couldn’t go to school and so you stayed at home and you played games and you watched TV and you stayed nice and warm. You were snowed in. So we used to love it. I think this is probably quite a British thing because most countries can deal with snow whereas we are not very prepared so when it snows heavily no one goes anywhere. Everyone has to stay at home.’ They forecasted a blizzard tonight so maybe we’ll be snowed in.’

So an Indian summer is a period of unusually warm weather at the end of summer or just after summer. So usually in Autumn. So in Britain it would be in September or October. If the weather is unusually warm, it’s an Indian summer. As I said this phrase comes from American English and dates back to the 1800s I don’t know exactly the etymology but it comes from America and it’s used here in Britain as well. So an example sentence ‘It looks like we’re going to have an Indian summer this year.’