Other forms: poured, pouring, pours
Pour means to tip a liquid out so it runs in a steady stream. Milk into tea, water off the boiled pasta, wine into a glass held out towards you.
Rain pours: it poured all afternoon, and the noun for that is a downpour. Crowds pour too — fans pouring out of a stadium, letters pouring in after a broadcast — anything moving in a large steady flow. Money gets poured into a project, a person pours their heart out to a friend, and someone who pours cold water on your plan is telling you it will not work. The spelling is the trap. Pour sounds like poor and like pore, and you pore over a map or a set of accounts; you never pour over them.
1verbpourTo make a liquid flow out of a container.
“He poured the soup into two bowls.”
Patternpour sth into / out of / over + noun · pour a drink · pour sb a cup · pour away · pouring rain
2verbrainTo rain hard and without stopping.
“It poured all the way home and we arrived soaked.”
3verbmoveTo move somewhere in a large steady stream.
“Commuters poured through the barriers the moment the gates opened.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
POUR → the sky POURS rain like milk from a bottle
When it pours with rain, the sky is doing what you do with a bottle of milk: tipping it until everything runs out.
Nobody is sure where pour came from. Middle English pouren turns up with no clear parent; one guess links it to Old Northern French purer, to sift grain or pour off water, from Latin purus, pure — the picture being the clean liquid poured off the top. However it arrived, it quietly pushed several older English verbs out of the job.
Latin
pūrō — to purify
fro-nor
purer — to sift (grain), pour out (water)
Middle English
pouren — to pour
English, today
pour
Built from
From Middle English pouren (“to pour”), of unknown origin. Perhaps from fro-nor purer (“to sift (grain), pour out (water)”), from Latin pūrō (“to purify”), from pūrus (“pure”). Compare Middle Dutch afpuren (“to pour off, drain”). To pour displaced several Middle English verbs:
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA