AbstractA concise and objective definition of monsoon rainy season characteristics is proposed for worldwide monsoon regions. The result highlights six major summer monsoon rainy season domains and the mean dates of the local onset, peak and withdrawal phases of the summer monsoon rainy season. The onset phases occur progressively later poleward in the continental domains but primarily eastward in the oceanic monsoon regions. The rainy season retreats equatorward over the continental and oceanic monsoon regions. The length of the rainy season decreases poleward and shorter rainy season can also be found over the outskirts of warm water. Some exceptions exist in terms of the characteristics of rainy season, e.g. the westward advance of rainy season over North Africa and an apparently prolonged rainy season in the Korean peninsula. The results here are basically compatible with those obtained in previous studies on regional monsoons.A definition of the seasonal wind overturning is proposed. Combining rainfall and winds, we stratify the global monsoon into strong and weak categories. The strong monsoons are typically in the regions with both concentration of summer rainfall and annual reversal of low‐level winds, while the weak monsoon features only a contrasting wet–dry season. Seemingly, some mid‐latitude regions with wind reversals are not monsoonal because of the reversals being opposite to the monsoon overturning and the rainfall patterns being more or less Mediterranean.The comparison between the monsoon domains derived from Climate Prediction Center (CPC) Merged Analysis of Precipitation (CMAP) and the 40‐year European Centre for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasts Re‐Analysis (ERA‐40), the Japanese 25‐year Reanalysis (JRA‐25) and National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) datasets show good capabilities of the reanalyses in demarcation of the major monsoon rainy season domains in the tropics and subtropics. But the reanalyses are less realistic in the mid‐latitudes of Eurasia and North America. The result here provides the simple yet objective definitions of monsoon domain, onset, peak and withdrawal which are useful for validation of GCMs. Copyright © 2008 Royal Meteorological Society