Cat got your tongue? Find out how cats contribute to popular sayings …

by Farmers' Almanac Staff Updated: January 30, 2026

By Verbalist Richard Lederer | From the 2010 Edtion of Farmers’ Almanac

The poet Carl Sandburg wrote, “The fog comes in on little cat feet.” So does a large litter of our words and expressions. Whatever their ups and downs throughout history, cats have usually landed on their feet and have left their paw prints on our mother tongue.

Let’s categorize the cats that run and leap and pounce and slink and purr and meow through our English language. I hope you’ll find them to be, in the idiom of the roaring twenties, the cat’s meow, the cat’s pajamas, and the cat’s whiskers, so called because the cat is capable of looking enormously pleased and satisfied.

Quick as a cat, let’s make a “feline” for cat words in our English language.

The words cat and pussy derive from the Latin and Anglo-Saxon names for the animal—cattus and pus. In some African languages, a man is referred to as a cat, which in American slang gives us the likes of cool cat, hepcat, and fat cat.

Kitty-cornered.

Cats have kittens, and so does our English language. Kitty-cornered issues from “cater-cornered,” which comes from “quatre cornered,” which in French originally meant “four-cornered.” By a process called folk etymology, speakers thought that in “quatre-cornered” they were hearing an analogy to a certain domestic feline. In the card game of faro, the tiger was the bank or house, possibly because the tiger was once used on signs marking the entrance to Chinese gambling houses. Over the years gamblers transformed the tiger into a kitty, and it became the name for the pot in poker and other card games. Thus, when one contributes to the common store of betting money, one sweetens (or fattens) the kitty.

Cat got your tongue?

Cat and mouse.

On the subject of cat-and-mouse games, we find a curious relationship between social history and phrase origins. Surprisingly, feminists arrested during the suffragette agitation in England in about 1913 inspired the first popular use of the expression to play cat and mouse with. When imprisoned, the suffragettes often went on hunger strikes and the British Parliament retaliated by passing the “Prisoners’ Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health Act.” The bill provided that hunger strikers be set free while fasting, but, when they recovered, they were liable for re-arrest to complete their sentences. Critics compared the government’s action to a big cat playing with a little mouse and dubbed the legislation “The Cat-and-Mouse Act,” which entered common parlance as to play cat and mouse with.

Something the cat dragged in.

Harking back to its larger and fiercer ancestors, many cats have a passion for chipmunks, field mice, birds, and other outdoor animals. They proudly deposit the corpses at their owners’ doorsteps or behind and under furniture, a practice that gave rise, about 1920, to the expression looking like something the cat dragged in. While cats are valued for hunting pests, they do not always discriminate among their prey, and the cat that goes after its owner’s prized pet bird may be in for a good scolding. To look like the cat that ate the canary originally meant to look guilty, but nowadays means to appear smug and self-satisfied.

Fighting like cats and dogs.

It is both ironic and telling that an animal without the power of human speech has made such significant contributions to our language. There abound a number of explanations for it’s raining cats and dogs, including the fact that felines and canines were closely associated with the rain and wind in northern mythology. In Odin days, dogs were often pictured as the attendants of Odin, the storm god, and cats were believed to cause storms. Another theory posits that during heavy rains in seventeenth-century England, some city streets became raging rivers of filth carrying many drowned cats and dogs. But the truth appears to be more mundane. Cats and dogs make a lot of noise when they fight (hence, “fighting like cats and dogs”), so they have become a metaphor for a noisy rain.

Let the cat out of the bag!

Why can’t some animals keep secrets? Because pigs squeal, yaks yak, and someone always lets the cat out of the bag. Not long ago, city slickers had to beware of buying a pig in a poke (bag) from a farmer who wasn’t in any way a country bumpkin. The animals inside such pokes were sometimes cats or kittens the canny country folk had substituted for suckling pigs. When the merchant opened the poke, he often let the cat out of the bag, revealing the crafty farmer’s secret. When the cat ran off, the city bumpkin was left holding the bag.

Related: Can Cats Predict Weather?

Get one’s back up.

When a cat is attacked by a dog or other animal, it aggressively arches its back, a response that suggested the phrase to get one’s back up to describe humans aroused into anger. On the other paw, cats are often pictured as grinning. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, best known to the world as Lewis Carroll, popularized the Cheshire cat in his children-of-all-ages classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The Cheshire Cat in the story gradually faded from Alice’s view, its smile being the last part of the animal to vanish. To grin like a Cheshire cat goes back before Carroll, and the source could be Cheshire cheeses, which were at one time molded in the form of a cat. Another theory contends that the cat grins because the former palatine of Cheshire once had regal privileges in England, paying no taxes to the crown.

Having kittens.

The phrase having kittens suggests a condition of severe anxiety. In bygone, more superstitious days, pregnant women who experienced long, painful labors were thought to be bewitched and about to give birth to a litter of felines.

There’s more than one way …

An old British expression advised that “There’s more than one way of killing a cat than choking it with cream.” This implied that a method of doing something was rather foolish, since cats like cream and wouldn’t be able to choke to death on it. But the saying changed to There’s more than one way to skin a cat and gradually took on its present meaning—that there are more ways than one of accomplishing something.

Both the droopy pussy willow and the tall, reedlike cattail are so called for their resemblance to a cat’s freely swinging tail. Because of that visual similarity and because it “scratched” the back like a cat, some black humorist coined the name cat-o’-nine-tails for the terrible whip. In addition, the first Egyptian scourges were made of thongs of cat hide.

Nine lives.

Cats have long been regarded as tenacious of life because of their careful, suspicious nature and because they are supple animals that can survive long falls. The Old English saying a cat has nine lives goes back well before the sixteenth century, and the nine “tails” of the whip being similar to the nine lives of a cat might have suggested the full name cat-o’-nine tails.

When we say or write no room to swing a cat, we are not referring to the animal but to the knotted cat-o’-nine-tails whip used to punish disobedient sailors. The scourge was too long to swing below deck, so punishment was always applied outdoors and left scars like those from a cat’s scratch.