This is a famous line from the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. In the play, a character named Henry Higgins is teaching a lower-class woman named Eliza Doolittle how to speak proper English. He tells her that the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain in order to help her remember the correct pronunciation of the word “plain.”
Incidentally this is wrong. The line is from a movie adaptation, not the original play. And at least in the song (which came still later), “plain” wasn’t singled out; there are five copies of that vowel in the phrase and she couldn’t get any of them at first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rain_in_Spain
The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.
This is a famous line from the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. In the play, a character named Henry Higgins is teaching a lower-class woman named Eliza Doolittle how to speak proper English. He tells her that the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain in order to help her remember the correct pronunciation of the word “plain.”
Incidentally this is wrong. The line is from a movie adaptation, not the original play. And at least in the song (which came still later), “plain” wasn’t singled out; there are five copies of that vowel in the phrase and she couldn’t get any of them at first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rain_in_Spain