Cat

How to spell cat

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cat

What does cat mean?

1. nounA small domesticated carnivorous mammal kept as a pet or for catching mice.

Cat in a sentence

• The cat curled up on the warm windowsill all afternoon.

• Every morning she fed the cat before leaving for work.

Where does cat come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes from the Old English catt, a name for the small domestic feline that was already common across early medieval Europe. It belongs to a wide family of look-alike words, including Latin cattus, Late Greek katta, and forms in Germanic languages such as Old Norse kottr and German Katze, all probably spreading from a single shared source in the early centuries of the Roman world. The ultimate origin is genuinely uncertain; many scholars suspect a borrowing from an African or Near Eastern language that travelled along trade routes with the animal itself. What is clear is that the word arrived in English very early and has barely changed in either sound or spelling for over a thousand years. Its short, three-letter form, one consonant, one vowel, one consonant, makes it one of the most phonetically regular words in the language.

How the word is built

• cat (single root, from Old English catt)