When I want to describe days where there is much rain, should I use “raining days” or “rainy days?”
I used to think “rainy days” is it, bu then the Marriam-Webster’s gives “a period of want or need” as the definition for “rainy day.”
Please help.
Rainy days
wet weather is sometimes used as well
rainy days is spot on:)
In this context, “rainy day” is what’s known as an idiom - a speech form or an expression that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements, as in “keep tabs on” (paraphased from American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language).
Now, just because “rainy day” happens to be an idiom in English does NOT mean that the adjective “rainy” plus the noun “day” CANNOT be combined to mean something other than “a period of want or need”. It’s still acceptable to exclaim “It sure has been a rainy day” when it’s actually been raining outside all afternoon.
Consider another idiom, “red herring”. Though the idiom normally means “a false clue”, there’s nothing wrong with describing a dish of paprika-covered herring as “red herring” if one wanted to.
Merriam-Webster is giving the figurative definition of rainy day, as in the term rainy day fund. The literal definition of rainy day means just what you think, a day when it rains a lot.
I would suggest ‘period of sustained inclement weather’.
That should do the trick.
Thanks all.
XJETGIRLX,
ACK! 
I think the m-w definition goes with the quote “save it for a rainy day”, meaning to put something aside and use it at a time when it would be most useful, for example, saving movie passes for a day when its raining and there’s nothing else to do. I think the rainy day part could be figurative too, as in putting aside a small lottery winning to use when bills are due and you might otherwise be overwhelmed.
I’m surprised it doesn’t explain the literal meaning of rainy day, unless the dictionary writers thought it was too obvious.
The literal meaning would be found by looking up the words separately, no?