cat
/ˈkæt/
"cat" is a 3-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“cat” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #1,713) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #1,713
- frequency rank, English
- 5,599
- “C” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Terms relating to animals.
Corpus desk
Index EN-cat · cat · English
cat · rank #1,713 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #1,713
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 5,599
- PHOTO-FINISH aware
Nearest frequency peer: aware (-1 rank slots)
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
Frequency neighbours of confusable “cat”
Peers at similar corpus weight, separate from look-alike pairs below
- advantage
advantage
98,291 corpus weight
- apart
apart
98,290 corpus weight
- aware
aware
98,289 corpus weight
- cat
cat
98,288 corpus weight
- customers
customers
98,287 corpus weight
- decide
decide
98,286 corpus weight
What this shows Bars place “cat” against nearest ranked English headwords, not a reprint of the confusable-pair desk.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | cat |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈkæt/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #1,713 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Corpus rank beside confusables of “cat”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for cat is neighbouring look-alikes ("co", "CD", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced /ˈkæt/. Frequency #1,713 among 5,599 “C” headwords. 18 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for cat, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "co", "CD", "CM", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English cat, catte, from Old English catt (“male cat”), catte (“female cat”), from Proto-West Germanic *kattu, from Proto-Germanic *kattuz, generally thought to be from Late Latin cattus (“domestic cat”) (c. 350, Palladius), from Latin catta (c.… The correct English form is cat, spelled C-A-T.
Definition
- 1Terms relating to animals.
- 2Terms relating to animals.
- 3Terms relating to animals.
- 4Terms relating to animals.
- 5Terms relating to animals.
- 6Terms relating to people.
- 7Terms relating to people.
- 8Terms relating to people.
- 9Terms relating to people.
- 10Terms relating to people.
- 11Terms relating to things.
- 12Terms relating to things.
- 13Terms relating to things.
- 14Terms relating to things.
- 15Terms relating to things.
- 16Terms relating to things.
- 17Terms relating to things.
- 18Terms relating to things.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how cat appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Mammals need two genes to make the taste receptor for sugar. Studies in various cats (tigers, cheetahs and domestic cats) showed that one of these genes has mutated and no longer works.
At twilight in the summer there is never anybody to fear—man, woman, or cat—in the chambers and at that hour the mice come out. They do not eat parchment or foolscap or red tape, but they eat the luncheon crumbs.
Etymology
From Middle English cat, catte, from Old English catt (“male cat”), catte (“female cat”), from Proto-West Germanic *kattu, from Proto-Germanic *kattuz, generally thought to be from Late Latin cattus (“domestic cat”) (c. 350, Palladius), from Latin catta (c. 75 A.D., Martial), possibly from an Afroasiatic language. This would roughly match how domestic cats themselves spread, as genetic studies suggest they began to spread out of the Near East / Fertile Crescent during the Neolithic (being in Cyprus by 9500 years ago, and Greece and Italy by 2500 years ago), especially after they became popular in Egypt. However, every proposed source word has presented problems. Adolphe Pictet and many subsequent sources refer to Barabra (Nubian) [script needed] (kaddîska) and "Nouba" (Nobiin) ⲕⲁⲇⲓ̄ⲥ (kadīs, “kadīs”) as possible sources or cognates, but M. Lionel Bender says the Nubian word is a loan from Arabic قِطَّة (qiṭṭa). Ibn Duraid dismissed Arabic قِطَّة (qiṭṭa) as non-Arabic in origin, whereas the more "proper" term in Arabic is the now-rare Arabic سِنَّوْر (sinnawr). Jean-Paul Savignac suggests the Latin word is from an Egyptian precursor of Coptic ϣⲁⲩ (šau, “tomcat”) suffixed with feminine -t, but John Huehnergard says "the source … was clearly not Egyptian itself, where no analogous form is attested." It may be a wanderword. Kroonen says the word must have existed in Germanic from a very early date, as it shows morphological alternations, and suggests that it might have been borrowed from Uralic, compare Northern Sami gađfe (“female stoat”) and Hungarian hölgy (“stoat; lady, bride”) from Proto-Uralic *käďwä (“female (of a fur animal)”). Cognates Related to Scots cat (“cat”), North Frisian kaat, kaot, Kat, kåt (“cat”), Saterland Frisian Kat (“cat”), West Frisian kat (“cat”), Alemannic German Chats, Chatz, chatza, chatzu, chatzò, chàzzà, Kàtz (“cat”), Bavarian ckozza, Katz, khoze, kòtze (“cat”), Cimbrian katze, khatz, khatza (“cat”), Dutch kat (“cat”), German Katze (“cat”), German Low German Katt (“cat”), Luxembourgish Kaz (“cat”), Mòcheno kòtz (“cat”), Yiddish קאַץ (kats, “cat”), Danish kat (“cat”), Faroese køttur (“cat”), Icelandic köttur (“cat”), Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish katt (“cat”), Latin cattus, catus (“cat”), Aromanian cãtush (“cat”), French chat (“cat”), Occitan, Norman cat (“cat”), Portuguese, Spanish gato (“cat”), Breton kaz, kazh (“cat”), Cornish cath, kath (“cat”), Irish cat, cut (“cat”), Scottish Gaelic cat (“cat”), Welsh cath (“cat”), as well as Ancient Greek κάτα (káta), κάττα (kátta, “cat”), Greek γάτα (gáta, “cat”), Turkish kedi (“cat”), and from the same ultimate source Belarusian, Russian кот (kot, “cat”), Ukrainian кіт (kit, “cat”), Polish kot (“cat”), Kashubian kòt (“cat”), Latvian kaķis (“cat”), Lithuanian katė (“cat”), and more distantly Armenian կատու (katu, “cat”), Basque katu (“cat”), Georgian კატა (ḳaṭa, “cat”), Classical Syriac ܩܛܐ, ܩܛܘ (“cat”), Arabic قِطَّة (qiṭṭa, “cat”) alongside dialectal Maghrebi Arabic قَطُّوس (qaṭṭūs, “cat”) (from Berber, probably from Latin).
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
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Similar English words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "cat", not the corpus desk frequency band.