precipitation

A hydrometeor consisting of a set of aqueous particles - in liquid or solid phase - that fall through the atmosphere, usually from a cloud, and reach the Earth's surface. Depending on the type of element that falls, different forms of precipitation are catalogued, such as rain, drizzle, snow, sleet, hail, cinarra, or diamond dust; all of them with their corresponding entries in this dictionary. Although nowadays we associate precipitation with the fall of one of those meteors, originally - in the 18th century - the term began to be used, but for a different reason. Some chemists of the time thought that water was dissolved in the air in a manner similar to how salts are dissolved in water; the formation of raindrops was thus mistakenly conceived as the precipitate resulting from a chemical reaction taking place in the atmosphere.