cat
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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3 characters
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English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "cat", 3-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "cat" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "cat" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
cat is aEnglishnoun. It means: Terms relating to animals. Pronounced /ˈkæt/. It ranks #1,713 in English word frequency. Often confused with co and CD.
| 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) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for cat is 3 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkæt/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,713 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 18 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for cat in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.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.… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is cat, spelled C-A-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
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.
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
Frequency rank: #1,713 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our English index: