WE are the nation which has more words for rain than the Eskimos have for snow.

From a yillen to a lashin, from a murr to a haar, Scots know how to describe every possible way to get drookit.

Now, at long last, the Met Office has decided to tell us just how wet we will be in wur ain leid.

Britain’s forecaster has formally announced that it will use what it rather controversially calls “regional slang” in its broadcasts.

It says even people using standard English across the UK have a huge variety of terms for the weather they are experiencing. Crucially, the experts at the Met Office think these words could be more accurate than scientific terms they prefer as they perform in front of their isobars.

Derrick Ryall, Head of Public Weather Service at the Met Office, explained “The range of slang for rain alone demonstrates the breadth and diversity of the English language and the varying terminology used across different parts of the UK.

“As the UK’s National Weather Service, we’re always looking to improve the way weather forecasts are communicated, to make them as useful as possible and increase their understanding. We’re asking the public to help us better understand how they talk about the weather by describing it in just 3 words on Twitter, giving us their location and using the hashtag #3wordweather starting on February 1.

“Ultimately we hope to use the insights from our research to tap into local dialects and vocabulary to make it easier for people across the UK to understand the forecast and make informed decisions based on it.”

The Met Office – though perhaps better at meteorology than phonology – has carried out a survey of the ways British viewers refer to heavy rain. It found the term ‘pouring’ was the most widely used word to describe heavy rain across the UK.

However, the cities of Cardiff, Brighton and Liverpool were found to favour ‘pissing it. Mancunians, meanwhile, were revealed as the most likely to say that rain was ‘lashing it down’, with half (57%) of people surveyed in the Black Country preferring to say ‘bucketing’.

The people of Newcastle and Leeds apparently like the term ‘chucking it down’, with 6 in 10 people from Newcastle and Leeds describing torrential rain this way. Although many might assume that those in Cambridge and Oxford would avoid the use of slang, each similarly favoured the term ‘chucking it’ to describe heavy rain (83 per cent and 57 per cent).

Glaswegians are most likely to use the term ‘pelting it’ and Londoners prefer to say ‘caning it’. Despite being almost 90 miles apart, the people of Birmingham and Bristol share the use of ‘tipping it down’, with 44 per cent and 41 per cent. saying this respectively.

A fifth of people in Southampton claim to break into song when it rains heavily, performing renditions of ‘it’s raining, pouring, the old man is snoring’.

Back in 2015 academics at the University of Glasgow discovered a huge variety of Scots language words for both rain and snow. They found that the Scots language had 421 ones for snow, or sna, eight times more than the inuit or eskimos. The findings suggested our non-standardised language was almost as diverse and difficult as our weather.

Speaking three years ago, Dr Susan Rennie, lecturer in English and Scots language at Glasgow University, said: ‘Weather has been a vital part of people’s lives in Scotland for centuries.

‘The number and variety of words in the language show how important it was for our ancestors to communicate about the weather, which could so easily affect their livelihoods.