Gullywasher

noun, slang

noun, slang ·Uncommon ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    An intense, but usually short-lived, rainstorm. Midwestern-US, Southern-US, US, Western, informal

    ""Then maybe some preacher got a tad too zealous on Sunday" Thinking of his " frog-strangler," Lucy said, "In Montana, we'd call this a gullywasher." " Gullywasher. I like that." She could hear him, up there on the island in Thomas Jefferson's ..."

Example

More examples

""Then maybe some preacher got a tad too zealous on Sunday" Thinking of his " frog-strangler," Lucy said, "In Montana, we'd call this a gullywasher." " Gullywasher. I like that." She could hear him, up there on the island in Thomas Jefferson's ..."

Etymology

From gully + washer. First use appears c. 1903.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.