what does "right as rain" come from and what does it mean?

Answer 1

Right as rain:
In good order or good health, satisfactory, as in He was very ill, but he's right as rain now, or If she'd only worked on it another week everything would have been as right as rain. The allusion in this simile is unclear, but it originated in Britain, where rainy weather is a normal fact of life, and indeed W.L. Phelps wrote, "The expression 'right as rain' must have been invented by an Englishman." It was first recorded in 1894.

Answer 2

Nowadays in the English language “right as rain” is a kind of opaque cliché. Perhaps its basic meaning can be expressed as “straight as rain”, or “straight as rain falls”, aside from effects winds may have. Years ago, people used to call straight lines in English “right lines”, derived no doubt from the Latin linea recta, the term once in common use. The words “right” and “recta” appear to have come from an Indo-European root which means “to move in a straight line.” The metaphor plays on a resonance between geometric straightness and correctness of judgment. The basis for this metaphor appears to have been propagated by way of Indo-European languages for thousands of years. It seems to work by virtue of some underlying, hidden process that takes place when we acquire an Indo-European language.
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Answer 3

Perhaps surprisingly, there have been expressions starting right as ... since medieval times, always in the sense of something being satisfactory, safe, secure or comfortable. An early example, quoted as a proverb as long ago as 1546, is right as a line. In that, right might have had a literal sense of straightness, something desirable in a line, but it also clearly has a figurative sense of being correct or acceptable. There’s an even older example, from the Romance of the Rose of 1400: “right as an adamant”, where an adamant was a lodestone or magnet.

Lots of others have followed in the centuries since. There’s right as a gun, which appeared in one of John Fletcher’s plays, Prophetess, in 1622. Right as my leg is also from the seventeenth century — it’s in Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Rabelais, published in 1664: “Some were young, quaint, clever, neat, pretty, juicy, tight, brisk, buxom, proper, kind-hearted, and as right as my leg, to any man’s thinking”. There’s right as a trivet from the nineteenth century, a trivet being a stand for a pot or kettle placed over an open fire; this may be found in Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers of 1837: “ ‘I hope you are well, sir.’ ‘Right as a trivet, sir,’ replied Bob Sawyer.” About the same time, or a little later, people were saying that things were as right as ninepence, as right as a book, as right as nails, or as right as the bank.

Right as rain is a latecomer to this illustrious collection of curious similes. It may have first appeared at the very end of the nineteenth century, but the first example I can find is from Max Beerbohm’s book Yet Again of 1909: “He looked, as himself would undoubtedly have said, ‘fit as a fiddle,’ or ‘right as rain.’ His cheeks were rosy, his eyes sparkling”. Since then it has almost completely taken over from the others.

It makes no more sense than the variants it has usurped and is clearly just a play on words (though perhaps there’s a lurking idea that rain often comes straight down, in a right line, to use the old sense). But the alliteration was undoubtedly why it was created and has helped its survival. As right as ninepence has had a good run, too, but that has vanished even in Britain since we decimalised the coinage and since ninepence stopped being worth very much.