April Showers  - by Steve Hardin                                                                

We’ve all heard how “April showers bring May flowers.”  You may know the old song about “though April showers may come your way, they bring the flowers that bloom in May.”  You may even know the old grade school riddle:  “If April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring?”  Answer:  “Pilgrims.” 

But did you know the popular saying is merely the tip of the iceberg for April weather aphorisms?  For example:

• After a wet April follows a dry June.
• April and May are the keys of the whole year.
• April moist and warm makes the farmer sing like a nightingale.
• An April shower and May sun, will make cloth bright and fair maids dun.  (“Dun” means “dingy” here.)
• April snow breeds grass.
• April with his hack and his bill, sets a flower on every hill.
• April showers bring May flowers, but who wants to wade through mud to see a bud? 

You can find these sayings, and a lot more, in our reference collection at

QC998.W43 1996.  The book is titled Weather Wisdom: Proverbs, Superstitions, and Signs. 

Is April really the wettest month?  Not in Terre Haute. If you look at the long-term averages from 1971 through 2000, July is the wettest month around here (4.90 inches of rain), followed by May (4.47 in.).  April comes in third in terms of total precipitation at 3.89 inches.  April comes in third even if you allow for the fact that it has only 30 days as opposed to July and May’s 31.    Even if you go back to the country where the English language (and a lot of our folk sayings) originated, you’ll find that measurements taken at London’s Heathrow Airport between 1981 and 1990 show that on average April is tied with August and September for the second driest month of the year!

If April’s so dry, why all the hoopla about April showers?  The key word is shower.  Rainy days are overcast, dreary and wet.  But showery days can be mostly sunny, with occasional brief downpours which drench only a small part of the landscape.  In short, the weather situation on a showery day is unstable, which often happens as winter yields to spring.  Other April quotes bring out this shade of meaning:

• “The Aprill’s in her eyes; it is Loue’s spring.”  - Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 1606
• “She’s like myself An April-hearted thing.” – Amelia Ball Welby, Poems, 1844
• “And hopes and light regrets that come, Make April of her tender eyes.” – Tennyson, In Memoriam, 1850

The source for these quotes is that good old reference standard, The Oxford English Dictionary, in the Reference collection at PE1625.O87 1989 (available electronically, too).