AS WE are at the start a Bank Holiday weekend, I guarantee that at some stage it will rain between now and Tuesday.

But surely I can be more inventive with my words than that. The Sami people of northern Europe have 20 or so ways of saying “snow” because they live around the Arctic Circle. In the many centuries that the British have been talking non-stop about the weather, English must have acquired a sizeable vocabulary about it.

Take that most common aspect of British weather, the wet stuff in the air that’s not snow.

It could be fog or mist.

The pedants will say that one is a cloud at ground level, the other water vapour rising from the ground. The experts – the Met Office and the Oxford English Dictionary – don’t care and say fog is the thicker version and mist the thinner.

Then there’s Scotch mist, which often occurs south of the Border. That’s a drizzly type of mist, also known as mizzle. As the raindrops increase, it will turn into drizzle.

Suppose we have a clear, but overcast day. It may start thinking of raining or trying to rain, then it will be spitting and the Centre Court roof at Wimbledon will be closed. If it doesn’t result in a sprinkling or a splash, we may get showers.

These, of course, may be intermittent, occasional, isolated, local, and so on, all of which apparently have specialised meanings as to the quantity and likelihood of showers if you are a meteorologist, but to you and me mean taking an umbrella, because if you do you won’t need it and if you don’t, you will.

Instead of showers, we may get a squall or a cloud burst as the skies open, producing a downpour or a torrent and giving everywhere a soaking or a drenching in a deluge.

Strange animals may appear as it rains cats and dogs and the water comes down in stair-rods or sheets . It could be like a monsoon outside with floods of water, even though real monsoons can’t happen in Britain.

By now it’s not a shower but a rainstorm, storm for short, and if it starts getting noisy, a thunderstorm. In winter, we could have thunder-snow, which is a winter thunderstorm or thunder snowstorm. I wonder what the Sami call one of those.

Other types of storm are tropical storms, hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons, depending on which part of the world you are in. All of them can be called tempests and will have driving rain.

Rain, of course, produces puddles, which fill Headingley when the rain sets in for the day and the Test Match Special commentators hold one of their five-hour chat marathons. Every now and again, one of them will look out of the window to see if it’s clearing, only to find it’s still bucketing down, pelting with rain and teeming down.

Rain that doesn’t reach the ground, but evaporates mid-air is virga. If you see a cumulus trailing a grey veil with space between it and the ground, that will be virga.

At the colder end of the year, we could get wintry showers – when the weather can’t decide if it wants to snow or rain – freezing rain, sleet or hail.

We may also get graupel, or soft hail, which is a contradiction in terms and may explain why we don’t hear the word very often.

Hail falls as hailstones in hailstorms, just as snow falls in snowstorms or blizzards.

I haven’t even started on winds from zephyrs to gales or clouds from mare’s tails to thunderheads, or atmosphere words such as muggy and close.

Forget about the Sami snow vocabulary, English has a weather vocabulary to be proud of.