What Is the ‘It’ in ‘It Is Raining’?

Of the many peculiar words that exist in the English language, some of the shortest can be the hardest to explain.

Consider “it.” We use this tiny pronoun constantly, often without giving it (no pun intended) much thought. Sometimes “it” clearly refers to something: “I found the earring and put it on the dresser.” Other times, however, “it” doesn’t seem to refer to anything at all. Take this sentence: “It is raining.” What exactly is “it”?

The short answer is: nothing. In this sentence, “it” isn’t standing in for some previously mentioned noun or thing. It’s what grammarians call a dummy pronoun, or an expletive pronoun — a word that serves as the grammatical subject.

English generally expects a complete sentence to have a subject and a verb. In “It is raining,” “it” is the subject and “is raining” is the verb phrase. In other words, the “it” in “It is raining” isn’t telling us what is raining — it’s fulfilling a grammatical requirement.This form of expletive, commonly found in discussions about the weather — “it’s snowing,” “it’s freezing,” “it’s getting dark” — is also called the impersonal “it.” In each case, there isn’t a specific thing that the “it” refers to. English simply puts “it” into the subject position and moves on.

But weather isn’t the only place where English pulls this grammatical trick.

Consider the following sentence: “It’s surprising that he attended the party.”

Here, “it” still isn’t referring to a particular object, person, or place, but it is doing something slightly different. The real idea we’re talking about — that he attended the party — comes later in the sentence.

Grammarians sometimes call this the anticipatory “it,” because “it” essentially stands in for information that appears later. You could rearrange the sentence as, “That he attended the party is surprising,” and it would still be grammatically correct. But it sounds considerably more formal and awkward in everyday conversation.

English tends to prefer the first version. “It’s surprising that he attended the party” gives us a short, uncomplicated subject — “it” — and lets the details come later.

You can find the same construction in sentences such as, “It’s important to eat breakfast every morning,” “It’s nice to meet you,” and “It was difficult to follow the directions.” In each case, “it” points toward a later idea rather than referring to some concrete thing that came before it.

So if the dummy “it” fills a grammatical slot and the anticipatory “it” helps move a longer or more complicated idea toward the end of the sentence, where does that leave the “it” you’re probably most familiar with?

When someone says, “I found the earring and put it on the dresser,” “it” has a very specific job. The pronoun refers back to the earring. Grammarians call this the referential “it,” and it’s the kind of pronoun you probably learned about in grammar school.

You can replace “it” with the noun it represents and say: “I found the earring and put the earring on the dresser.” The sentence is repetitive, but the meaning is clear.

You can’t do the same thing with “It is raining.” There is no noun that can stand in for “it” and preserve the sentence’s meaning: “The rain is raining” doesn’t make sense.

“It” looks exactly the same in all of these sentences, but its grammatical job varies drastically, depending on the context.

That may be the strangest thing about “it”: We barely notice how much work this two-letter word is doing.

It can refer to a very specific thing; it can point toward an idea that hasn’t arrived yet; and sometimes, as in the case of “It is raining,” it doesn’t refer to anything at all.