Japanese Names Meaning Rain

Short answer

• The Japanese word for rain is ame, written with the kanji 雨. Jisho, the dictionary built on the JMdict project, lists 雨 (ame) as the common noun for rain and for rainy weather. That single kanji is the root of almost every genuine rain name in this article.
• A Japanese name means rain only when its written form contains a rain kanji. The sound of a name proves nothing on its own. Amaya means night rain only when it is written 雨夜, rain plus night. Written with other kanji, the same sound means something else entirely.
• The strongest verified girl names are Amaya (雨夜, night rain), Amane (雨音, sound of rain), Amami and Amana, which pair the rain kanji with sea, beauty or greens, and Shizuku (雫), droplet, a name whose kanji is built from the rain radical itself.
• For boys and for unisex use the honest list is shorter: Uten (雨天, rainy weather), the rare Tsuyuo, built on the rainy season word tsuyu, and Shigure (時雨), the late autumn shower, recorded as a rare name for girls and boys.
• Tsuyu (梅雨) is the rainy season itself, usually early June to mid July in most of Japan, and samidare (五月雨) is early summer rain. Both are season words in Japanese poetry, and both appear inside names, but neither is a common given name on its own.
• Arashi (嵐) means storm, not rain, and ameotoko (雨男) is not a name at all. Arashi is a real boys name for the storm that brings rain. Ameotoko, literally rain man, is a joking label for a man whose outings always attract rain.
• Check the kanji before you trust any rain name list. Long online lists pad this small topic with sound alike names and invented spellings.

The Japanese Word for Rain: Ame

Ame is one of the first words a learner of Japanese meets. Jisho lists 雨 (ame) as a common noun meaning rain, with the added senses of a rainy day or rainy weather. The verb phrase is ame ga furu, rain falls. The same character is also a radical, a building block inside other kanji: the droplet name Shizuku, written 雫, is literally the rain radical over the character for below, a drop falling from the rain. The storm kanji 嵐 (arashi) instead carries wind inside a mountain shape, a clue that it means violent weather as a whole, not rain alone.

The rain kanji has two main readings that matter for names. Read ame or ama, it is the native Japanese reading, the everyday word. Read u, it is the Chinese derived reading heard inside compounds. That second reading is why rain appears in names where an English reader would never spot it: Urin can be written 雨凛, rain plus dignified, and one spelling of Riu ends in 雨 read u. A romanized name hides all of this. Only the written form shows whether rain is really there, which is the single most important fact in this article and the test applied to every name below. Japanese also sorts rain by season, weight and mood far more finely than English does, with words for a droplet, for icy rain, for light rain and for misty drizzle, and the name lists below draw on that whole range rather than on the one word ame alone.

How a Japanese Name Gets a Rain Meaning

A Japanese given name is a sound plus a written form. Parents choose a sound they like, then choose the kanji that will carry that sound, and the kanji fix the meaning. Change the kanji and the meaning changes while the spoken name stays the same. Amaya is the cleanest example in this article. Name references record 雨夜, rain plus night, as its most common spelling, the spelling that makes it a night rain name. The same site lists other spellings built on characters meaning Asia, true and arrow, which have nothing to do with rain at all. Both are real ways to write Amaya. Only one of them is a rain name.

Readings add a second layer. The rain kanji is read ame on its own, ama at the start of Amaya, Amami and Amana, and u inside Urin, Riu and Uten. A reader who only knows the word ame will miss most of the genuine rain names, and a list maker who only searches for the letters ame will invent the rest. That is how this topic fills up with errors online. There is also a limit on invention: Japan restricts the kanji that can be registered in a child given name to the everyday use kanji plus the official name kanji list, roughly 3,000 characters, and the rain kanji is an everyday character, so genuine rain spellings are registrable while assembled generator spellings may not be.

Rain Names for Girls, Verified by Kanji

Amaya, written 雨夜. The headline rain name for a girl, and one of the few that survives checking exactly as the lists present it. Japanese-names.info records 雨夜, rain plus night, as the most common kanji writing of Amaya, ahead of spellings built on Asia, true and arrow. The compound amaya, a rainy night, has a long literary life. The rainy night conversation in The Tale of Genji, where young courtiers rank the qualities of women through a long wet evening, is one of the most famous scenes in Japanese literature, and it gives the name a quiet, reflective register rather than a stormy one. Pronounced ah-MAH-yah. One caution: Amaya is also a Basque and Spanish name with a separate history, so the night rain meaning belongs to the Japanese written form only. Readers drawn to the night half of this name will find its companion topic in our guide to Japanese names that mean moon, where the night sky rather than the night rain does the work.

Amane, written 雨音. Amane is a unisex name used for girls and boys, and its rain spelling pairs 雨, rain, with 音, sound: the sound of rain. Japanese-names.info lists 雨音 among the most common writings of Amane for both girls and boys, alongside 天音, heavenly sound, and 海音, sea sound. The same spoken name can therefore be a rain name, a heaven name or a sea name, and the family chooses which. In its rain spelling it is one of the most usable names in this article: gentle, current and unambiguous once the kanji are shown. Pronounced ah-MAH-neh.

Amami, written 雨海 or 雨美, and Amana, written 雨菜. The submitted name lists at Behind the Name record Amami from 雨 (ama), rain, combined with 海 (mi), sea, or 美 (mi), beauty, and Amana from rain combined with 菜 (na), vegetables or greens: rain over the sea, and rain on green growth. The site is clear that its submitted entries are contributed by users and that their accuracy cannot be guaranteed, so treat both as list attested spellings to confirm with a Japanese speaker before real world use. The pattern they show, rain plus a gentle second element, is however exactly how real rain names are built.

Urin, written 雨凛. Behind the Name submitted lists record Urin from 雨 (u), rain, combined with 凛 (rin), dignified, severe or cold. This is the name that proves the reading rule above. Nothing in the sound Urin suggests rain to an English ear, yet the rain kanji is its first character, read u. A dignified rain is a distinctive, wintry feeling for a character, quite different from the softness of Amaya.

Riu, in spellings ending in 雨. The submitted lists give Riu spellings such as 莉雨 and 李雨, pairing a first element meaning jasmine or plum with 雨 (u), rain. As with Amami, the spelling is the claim. Other Riu spellings end in a character for feather instead, and those are not rain names.

Shizuku, written 雫 or 滴. Shizuku means a droplet, and as a name it is recorded for girls, and less often for boys, by Japanese-names.info, which gives 雫 as the most common writing, with 滴, drop, as a variant. It is not the word rain itself, and this article does not pretend otherwise. It is the closest a name can come to a single raindrop, and that small scale is its appeal. The name is widely recognized through Shizuku Tsukishima, the heroine of the Studio Ghibli film Whisper of the Heart.

Tsuyu, as a name element. Jisho name records list Tsuyu as a female given name, but the name is usually written with characters chosen for their sound, and the rainy season spelling 梅雨 is a word, not the usual name spelling. The same sound written 露 means dew. So Tsuyu belongs here as a season word that can inspire a name, not as proof of a rainy season name, though a character called Tsuyu will be heard by Japanese readers as a seasonal reference first, which may be exactly the effect a writer wants.

Rain Names for Boys and Unisex Names

The honest boys list for rain is short, and its shortness is information. Japanese boys names built directly on the rain kanji are rare in the references, while storm, thunder and endurance names are common. What follows separates the genuine rain forms from the storm family that usually travels with them.

Uten, written 雨天. Behind the Name submitted lists record Uten for girls and boys, from 雨天 (uten), wet weather or rainy weather, the forecast term for rainy conditions. As a name it is unusual and weather literal, better suited to a character than to a child, but its written form is checkable and its meaning is exactly what this article promises.

Tsuyuo, built on 梅雨. The submitted lists record the rare boys name Tsuyuo from 梅雨 (tsuyu), the East Asian rainy season, or 露 (tsuyu), dew, combined with a final character meaning man, husband or hero. It is labeled rare in the source and should stay labeled rare here. It is, however, the most direct rainy season name for a boy that the references offer, and a useful proof that the season word does enter real naming, at the margins.

Shigure, written 時雨. Shigure is first a word: Jisho defines 時雨 (shigure) as a rain shower in late autumn or early winter, one of the most poetic rain words in the language. As a name it is recorded as rare for girls and boys in the submitted lists, using 時, time, and 雨 (u), rain. A passing shower that arrives with the cold is a melancholy, literary image, and the name carries that mood. It suits a quiet character far better than a cheerful one, and it is covered again in the season words section below.

Arashi, written 嵐. Arashi means storm or tempest. Jisho gives that as the first sense of 嵐 (arashi), and Behind the Name submitted lists record Arashi as a Japanese boys name from that same character. Arashi is not a rain name, and any list that files it under rain without comment is blurring a line. It belongs here as the storm name that rain characters are most often given, clearly labeled: the storm includes rain, wind and violence, and a character named Arashi will be read as powerful and disruptive, not calm. Pronounced ah-RAH-shee.

The thunder neighbors, honestly labeled. Summer rain in Japan arrives with thunder, and two words complete the storm family without being rain names: Rai (雷), thunder, which appears as a name element in the submitted lists, and Raiden (雷電), thunder and lightning, a mythic sounding form rather than an everyday name. Both are here only so a reader comparing lists can place them.

Tsuyu: The Rainy Season Behind the Names

No rain name makes full sense without tsuyu, because tsuyu is the season that taught Japanese culture to sort rain so finely. Jisho defines 梅雨 (tsuyu) as the East Asian rainy season, in Japan usually from early June to mid July, and as the rain that falls during it. The Japan Meteorological Agency announces the start, tsuyu-iri, and the end, tsuyu-ake, region by region each year, and long term averages put the Tokyo region season at roughly June 7 to July 19. The season travels north: Okinawa enters weeks earlier, northern Tohoku later, and Hokkaido has no tsuyu season at all. The written form explains the poetry of it. 梅 is plum and 雨 is rain: plum rain, the rain that falls while the plums ripen. The same word read baiu is the formal meteorological reading, heard in weather reporting.

Tsuyu rain is usually not dramatic. It is days of steady, humid, dripping weather under a stalled front, the kind of rain that fills rivers, feeds the rice paddies and soaks gardens slowly. That is the water cycle at its most visible, and readers who want the science of where that rain comes from and where it goes can follow it in our explainer on what the water cycle is. The season is also why rain names in Japan lean gentle rather than violent: the rain a June child is born into is nourishing rain, and night rain, sound of rain and rain on greens carry that register. The flower of the season makes the point visually. Japan-guide describes the hydrangea, ajisai, as typically blooming during the rainy season in June and July, making it the symbol and the most popular flower of the season, and gardeners meet the same plant from the practical side in our guide to when to prune hydrangeas. The season also travels the length of the country, the movement our guide to where Mount Fuji is in Japan helps to picture. For the wider water family that rain belongs to, see our companion guide to Japanese names meaning water.

Seasonal Rain Words: Samidare, Shigure and Their Family

Japanese poetry keeps a formal calendar of season words, called kigo, and rain supplies some of its most precise entries. The Five Hundred Essential Japanese Season Words, a standard translated saijiki list, files tsuyu as a midsummer season word, samidare as midsummer rain and shigure as an early winter shower. A name taken from this calendar therefore carries a date as well as a weather, which is why writers reach for these words and why each one below is given with its season attached.

Samidare (五月雨), early summer rain. Jisho defines samidare as early summer rain. Its written form is Fifth Month rain, fifth month in the old lunar calendar. It is the rain of the tsuyu weeks themselves, lingering and intermittent. As a name element it is poetic and old-fashioned rather than a registered everyday name. It works best as a poetic character name, used knowingly.

Shigure (時雨), the late autumn shower. Where samidare opens the rains, shigure closes the year. Jisho glosses it as a rain shower in late autumn or early winter, and the season word lists file it under early winter. It is the cold, brief shower that sends people under eaves and then stops, and classical poetry treats it as an emblem of passing time and quiet sadness. Of all the words in this section, it is the one that has genuinely crossed into naming, as the rare name covered above.

Harusame (春雨), spring rain, and Hisame (氷雨), cold rain. Harusame is the gentle spring rain that starts growth, and also, by a small collision Japanese speakers take in stride, the everyday word for glass noodles. Hisame, ice plus rain, is icy late autumn and winter rain, cold enough to suggest sleet. Neither is a common given name. Both appear in name lists as words, and they are presented that way here, as seasonal vocabulary a writer can use knowingly.

The weight words: kosame, kirisame, ooame, yuudachi. Kosame (小雨) is light rain, kirisame (霧雨) is misty drizzle, ooame (大雨) is heavy rain and goou (豪雨) is the torrential rain of weather warnings. Yuudachi (夕立) is the sudden evening shower of summer, short and violent, the opposite rhythm from tsuyu. None of these is a given name in normal use. Together they show the scale a Japanese speaker hears inside the single English word rain, and they are the vocabulary a writer needs to describe a rain character precisely, even when the name itself comes from the verified lists above. Readers who want the cold end of this calendar in name form can continue to our companion guide to Japanese names meaning winter, where snow rather than rain carries the season.

Words That Are Not Names: Ameotoko, Kaze, Umi and the Ami Correction

Four common list entries needed correction rather than expansion, and they are gathered here so that no reader carries the errors away.

Ameotoko is a label, not a name. Some lists offer Ameo, glossed as rain man, as a direct boy name. The real word is ameotoko (雨男), and Jisho defines its feminine twin ameonna (雨女) as a woman who brings the rain with her wherever she goes, a woman constantly unlucky with the weather. In modern Japanese these are joking labels for people whose picnics, weddings and sports days always seem to get rained on. A reference summary of the ameonna tradition adds that the male equivalent, ameotoko, is used in exactly the same modern way. Calling a child Ameotoko would be like naming a child Rain Magnet in English. As a nickname for a character it is funny and accurate. As a given name claim it is false, and it has been removed from the name lists.

Kaze means wind, and Umi means sea. Kaze (風) means wind and Umi (海) means sea, yet both are often listed beside rain names. Both are real vocabulary and real name elements, and Umi appears legitimately inside Amami and one spelling of Amane, but neither word contains rain or means rain. They are kept here only under their true meanings, for writers who want wind, sea and rain as separate, honestly labeled parts of a water themed character.

Ami does not mean rain in its common forms. Ami is often described as linked with rain and net imagery depending on kanji. The net half has a real root: ami written 網 is the everyday word for a net, and the sound Ami is a common girls name. Its common written forms, however, are built on characters such as Asia and beauty, and no rain spelling of Ami could be verified in the references used for this article. A rain claim for Ami should therefore be treated as unproven unless a writer can produce the exact 雨 spelling from a name reference. The sound alone, once again, proves nothing.

How to Verify a Rain Name Before You Use It

Five steps will catch almost every false rain name, and they work for any Japanese name meaning claim. First, demand the kanji: a meaning claim without a written form is uncheckable, and uncheckable claims on this topic are usually wrong. Second, look the kanji up in a general dictionary such as Jisho, and confirm the character carries the claimed meaning in one of its readings. This step confirms 雨 as rain in all its readings, ame, ama and u, and exposes spellings whose characters mean something unrelated. Third, check the name, not just the character, in a name specific reference such as Japanese-names.info or Behind the Name: a character can be real while a particular name built from it is unattested, and the references show which spelling is common and which is a rarity. Fourth, respect the label on the source. Behind the Name states plainly that its submitted names are user contributed and their accuracy cannot be guaranteed, so a submitted entry is a lead to verify, ideally with a Japanese speaker, not a proof. Fifth, for a real child, check registrability and real world reading: confirm the characters are on the permitted name kanji lists if the birth will be registered in Japan, and ask Japanese speakers how the name reads in daily life, because a name that is elegant in a romanized list can be dated or accidental in Japan.

Choosing a Rain Name: Baby, Character or Pen Name

For a baby, the verified core of this article is the working list: Amaya in its night rain spelling, Amane in its sound of rain spelling, and Shizuku for a droplet. Each is established, gentle and checkable, and each should still be confirmed with Japanese speakers before use, especially the exact spelling, because the spelling is the meaning. Expect the rain connection to live in the written name: spoken aloud, none of these names announces rain, and that privacy is part of their charm.

For a fictional character, the field widens honestly. Shigure gives a writer a late autumn shower with centuries of poetry behind it, Tsuyu gives a rainy season birth or a June setting, Arashi gives storm power under its true label, and even ameotoko works as an affectionate nickname for the character whose plans always get rained out. The season words let a writer date a scene by its rain alone. What fiction does not need is invented kanji presented as tradition. The real vocabulary is richer than the inventions. For a pen name or game name, prefer the established forms above over assembled spellings: associated with rain, written with the rain character, is a stronger and more credible description than a false claim of a literal translation.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Japanese word for rain?

Ame, written 雨. Jisho lists it as the common noun for rain and rainy weather. The rainy season is tsuyu (梅雨), early summer rain is samidare (五月雨), and a late autumn or early winter shower is shigure (時雨).

What Japanese name means night rain?

Amaya, when it is written 雨夜, rain plus night. Japanese-names.info records that as its most common spelling. Other spellings of Amaya use different kanji and do not mean night rain, so the written form has to be checked.

Is Amane a rain name?

It can be. Written 雨音, Amane means sound of rain, and that spelling is listed among its most common forms. Written 天音 it means heavenly sound instead. The spoken name alone does not settle which one a particular Amane carries.

Is there a Japanese boy name that means rain?

Few, and none is common. Uten (雨天, rainy weather) is recorded for boys and girls, the rare Tsuyuo is built on the rainy season word tsuyu, and Shigure (時雨) is a rare unisex name. The boy name Ameo found on some lists is a mistake: the real word, ameotoko, is a joking label for a man who always attracts rain, not a given name.

What is tsuyu?

Tsuyu (梅雨), literally plum rain, is the East Asian rainy season. In most of Japan it runs from early June to mid July, announced region by region by the Japan Meteorological Agency. Hokkaido does not have a tsuyu season. The word is also a midsummer season word in Japanese poetry.

Does Arashi mean rain?

No. Arashi (嵐) means storm or tempest. It is a real boys name and a good name for a storm character, but it is not a rain name, and lists that present it as one are blurring the difference between rain and the storm that brings it.

Can I trust long lists of Japanese rain names online?

Only where they show the kanji for each name and the kanji check out in a dictionary or a name reference. This is a small topic in the language itself. The genuine core is a handful of names built on the rain kanji and its readings, plus season words used poetically. Lists of a hundred or more rain names are padded with sound alike names, unrelated meanings and invented spellings.

Sources & references

• Jisho.org, dictionary entry for 雨 (ame). Rain as the common meaning, with rainy day and rainy weather senses. Opened and read for this adaptation.
• Jisho.org, dictionary search for tsuyu. 梅雨 (tsuyu) defined as the East Asian rainy season, in Japan usually from early June to mid July, and as rain during the rainy season, with the alternative reading baiu; 露 (tsuyu) defined separately as dew. Opened and read in full for this adaptation.
• Jisho.org, dictionary search for shigure. 時雨 (shigure) defined as a rain shower in late autumn or early winter, with Shigure also appearing in the name results. Opened and read in full for this adaptation.
• Jisho.org, dictionary search for samidare. 五月雨 (samidare) defined as early summer rain, with the alternative reading satsukiame. Opened and read in full for this adaptation.
• Jisho.org, dictionary search for arashi. 嵐 (arashi) defined as storm or tempest, with Arashi appearing in the name results. Opened and read in full for this adaptation.
• Jisho.org, dictionary search for ame. 雨女 (ameonna) defined as a woman who brings the rain with her wherever she goes, a woman constantly unlucky with the weather. Read in the published search results for this adaptation.
• Japanese-names.info, first name Amaya. 雨夜, rain plus night, recorded as the most common kanji writing, ahead of spellings built on Asia, true and arrow. Read in the published page summary for this adaptation.
• Japanese-names.info, first name Amane, girl and boy pages. 雨音, rain plus sound, listed among the most common writings alongside heavenly sound and sea sound forms. Read in the published page summaries for this adaptation.
• Japanese-names.info, first name Shizuku, girl and boy pages. 雫, droplet, as the most common writing, with 滴, drop, as a variant, and the note that the name is more commonly used for girls. Read in the published page summaries for this adaptation.
• Japanese-names.info, first names meaning rain. The name database search for the meaning rain, returning about 1,699 first names built on rain kanji, and the site guidance that Japan allows only the joyo and jinmeiyo kanji, about 3,000 characters, in a given name. Read in the published search summary for this adaptation.
• Behind the Name, submitted Japanese names. Amami from 雨 (ama), rain, combined with sea or beauty; Amana from rain combined with greens; Urin from 雨 (u), rain, combined with dignified; Riu spellings ending in rain; Uten from 雨天, rainy weather; Tsuyuo from the rainy season word combined with man or hero, labeled rare; Shigure from time plus rain, labeled rare; Arashi from storm. The site states that submitted names are user contributed and their accuracy cannot be guaranteed, and every name in this article that rests on these lists is flagged in the text. Read in the published browse lists for this adaptation.
• Wikipedia, Ameonna, summarizing the folklore and modern usage. Ameonna, rain woman, as a yokai thought to call forth rain in Toriyama Sekien illustration, and the modern usage in which ameonna, or the male equivalent ameotoko, refers to an unlucky person the rain seems to follow. Read in the published summary for this adaptation.
• Japan Meteorological Agency rainy season averages, as reported by MATCHA and Live Japan. Tsuyu running from the end of May to mid July depending on region, with average Tokyo region dates around June 7 to July 19, Okinawa around May 10 to June 21, northern Tohoku around June 15 to July 28, and the beginning and end announced by the agency each year. Read in the published summaries for this adaptation.
• The Five Hundred Essential Japanese Season Words, selected by Kenkichi Yamamoto, translated by Kris Young Kondo and William J. Higginson. Tsuyu listed as a midsummer season word, literally plum rain; samidare listed as midsummer rain, Fifth Month rain in the lunar calendar; shigure listed as an early winter shower. Read in the published list for this adaptation.
• Japan-guide.com, Japanese Hydrangea (Ajisai). Hydrangeas typically bloom during the rainy season in June and July, making them a symbol and the most popular flower of the season. Read in the published summary for this adaptation.