In this post you will learn many English expressions and vocabulary that you can use to talk about the weather.
In general, if you want to ask someone about the weather you can say,
- How’s the weather today?
- What’s the weather like?
If you want to talk about how hot or cold the temperature is you can simply ask,
- What’s the temperature there?
- What’s the temp there?
We shorten the word temperature to temp, you can even say:
- How hot is it there?
- How cold is it there?
Keep in mind that if you are talking to someone from the U.S., we use Fahrenheit, whereas the rest of the world uses Celsius. I know it’s strange. We don’t even say Fahrenheit though, when we’re talking about it, it’s just assumed that it’s Fahrenheit. We would say:
- It’s 50 degrees
- It’s 50 degrees out
- It’s 50 degrees outside
We’re gonna go into some common weather expressions and words by seasons. There’s four seasons, summer, fall/autumn, winter and spring.
I’m going to give you some common weather vocabulary and phrases for each season.
- It’s the perfect day outside today, usually meaning it’s beautiful, it’s sunny, it’s not too hot, not too cold,
- There’s not a cloud in the sky. You can say that when the sky is just completely blue, and beautiful.
- In the summer you’ll also hear people say, it’s hot, it’s sunny, it’s breezy, it’s scorching, which means it’s really hot,
- It’s humid out, meaning that there’s this little moisture in the air.
I actually checked today the weather forecast, and there’s an 81% humidity right now, which is high, it feels muggy, which means unpleasantly warm.
- It’s misting, or it’s drizzling, which is a light rain.
- It’s storming, it’s thundering, you know the loud noise from the sky.
My mom would say God is bowling in heaven during loud thunderstorms, because it would sound like a strike that you get in bowling, when all the pins go crashing down.
- It’s lightning, you know the flashes that you see in the sky,
which here in the Carolinas, where I live it’s common to have a summer storm every afternoon.
Some idiomatic expressions we use you may have heard:
- It’s raining cats and dogs, it doesn’t really make sense, but it means it’s raining so hard.
- I got caught in a downpour, which a downpour is also a really hard rain.
Some expressions for fall which is my favorite season:
- It’s cool out today, meaning more on the cold side, but not too cold.
- It’s a brisk day, it’s chilly out.
- It’s a clear day meaning there aren’t any clouds in the sky.
Some expressions with winter:
- It’s freezing, which means very cold
- You could say it’s frigid out, which also means very cold.
- It’s gloomy when the skies are dark and overcast.
- There’s a snowstorm or there is a blizzar, which means a lot of snow, usually you can’t even see in front of you.
- It’s a white out, which literally means it’s just white in front of you that’s all you see is this magical snow coming down like crazy.
- It’s hailing , when there’s those little balls of ice coming down from the sky, that’s called hail,
- It’s sleeting outside, which is a mixture of rain and snow.
Some weather expressions with spring.
- It’s foggy out, when you can’t see very well, there’s the clouds low to the ground,
- It’s cloudy,
- It’s windy out.
- You also may hear a tornado, it’s the strong circular wind that can cause a lot of damage,
- Hurricane, which is a storm with a very violent wind also causing destruction.
- “April showers bring May flowers,” showers are talking about rain, so rain in April brings the flowers in May.
If you want to talk about a prediction of the weather forecast you can say:
- It’s supposed to be,
- It’s supposed to be warm today,
- It’s supposed to rain today,
- It’s supposed to storm tomorrow.
If you want to talk about yesterday’s weather, you can say:
- it rained yesterday,
- it snowed yesterday
- it was it was cold yesterday
- it was hot yesterday
