Pleut

Pleut is the third-person singular present indicative form of the French verb pleuvoir, an impersonal verb meaning "to rain." In everyday French, weather is expressed with the impersonal subject il, so il pleut translates to "it is raining."

Pleuvoir is irregular and used only in impersonal constructions. Its main tenses include: present il pleut; imperfect il pleuvait; passé composé il a plu; passé simple il plut; future il pleuvra; conditional il pleuvrait; subjunctive present qu'il pleuve; past subjunctive qu'il plût (rare and literary). A common idiom is il pleut des cordes, meaning "it's raining heavily." For past weather, you typically say il a plu, "it rained," rather than a form with il pleuvait in a narrative past.

Etymology and background: pleuvoir derives from Old French pleuvoir/pleuivre and ultimately from Latin pluvere, linked to the noun pluie (rain) and the root pluv- found in related terms such as pluvial. The verb is characteristic of many weather expressions in French, where the subject is a non-personal, meteorological condition and il functions as a dummy subject.

In usage, pleuvoir and the form pleut appear widely in speech, writing, and media across the French-speaking world, particularly in discussions of weather, forecasts, and environmental topics.