Every cartoon, every weather icon, every kindergarten drawing gets it wrong. Raindrops aren’t teardrop-shaped. Not even close. And the actual shape is so weird that scientists argued about it for decades.
Here’s what’s really happening up there. When a raindrop first forms around a speck of dust in a cloud, it starts as a tiny sphere, surface tension pulls water into the most compact shape possible. But as it falls and gets bigger, air resistance pushes up on the bottom while gravity pulls down. Small drops (under 2mm) stay mostly spherical, like little flying marbles. But larger drops? They turn into hamburger buns.
Yes, you read that right. Big raindrops look like the top half of a hamburger bun, rounded on top, flat on the bottom. The air rushing past the falling drop pushes the bottom up into a flattened surface while the top stays curved. It gets weirder: really large drops (over 4-5mm) can’t hold their shape at all. They develop a depression in the bottom that makes them look like kidney beans or parachutes, and eventually they vibrate so violently they break apart into smaller drops. The terminal velocity of a raindrop, the fastest it can fall, maxes out at about 20 mph for large drops. Air resistance won’t let them go faster.
But here’s the mind-bending part: you’ve probably never actually seen a raindrop. The human eye can’t freeze the motion of something falling at 20 mph. What you see as a “raindrop” is actually a motion blur, a streak created by your brain trying to make sense of something moving too fast to perceive clearly. Scientists need high-speed cameras running at thousands of frames per second to see what raindrops really look like.
And the teardrop myth? It might come from artists in medieval times who drew water drops hanging from surfaces, those really are teardrop-shaped because they’re being pulled down by gravity while clinging to something. But a falling raindrop? That’s a whole different physics problem.
The size matters for another reason: bigger drops fall faster and hit harder, which is why a drizzle feels gentle (tiny drops, slow speed) but a thunderstorm hurts when it pelts you (big drops, maximum velocity). And when meteorologists talk about “rain rate,” they’re calculating how many drops of what size are falling per second. A “light rain” might be 100 drops per square meter per second of small drops. A “heavy rain” could be thousands of large drops hammering down. Same wet result, completely different sky geometry.
Next time you’re caught in a downpour, remember: you’re being attacked by millions of flying hamburger buns traveling at 20 mph. Reality is so much weirder than the emoji.