sick as a cat
"sick-as-a-cat" is a 10-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“sick as a cat” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as an adjective. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 13
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Very ill.
Corpus desk
Index EN-sick-as-a-cat · sick as a cat · English
sick as a cat · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 13 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "S" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
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.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | sick as a cat |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| Letters | 13 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “sick as a cat” in English
Rare enough to double-check
sick as a cat is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anadjective. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Very ill.".
No generated misspelling entries exist for sick as a cat in our index, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, a sign it's visually distinctive enough not to be mixed up with another word.
This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct English form is sick as a cat, spelled S-I-C-K- -A-S- -A- -C-A-T.
Definition
- 1Very ill.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how sick as a cat appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
`My head is splitting, my body is trembling, and I am as sick as a cat.'
Synonyms
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.