This is an explanation of the origins of the word, ‘cat’. I feel I should try and do this as it is at the heart of a site about cats. Although not always the case, there are many languages that have similar words to the English ‘cat’. Here are some examples:
- gat (Catalan)
- kat (Danish and Dutch)
- kato (Esperanto)
- kass (Estonian)
- chat (French)
- gato (Galician)
- katze (German)
- gatto (Italian)
- cattus (Latin)
- kaķis (Latvian)
- katė (Lithuanian)
- qattus (Maltese)
- katt (Norwegian)
- kot (Polish)
- gato (Portuguese and Spanish)
It appears we can go back to the word ‘utchat’. What does this word mean? It is the eye of Ra or Eye of Horus, an ancient Egyptian symbol and the Egyptian sacred eye:
The Egyptian Cat Goddess Bast was, in the early days, a lion headed goddess. She protected the Pharaoh and the sun God Ra. She was the goddess of protection. In that role she was the holder of the Utchat – the all seeing eye.
In later years she had the head of a cat and represented ‘more nurturing aspects’ (http://www.goddess-guide.com). By the time of the Middle Kingdom (2055 BC and 1650 BC) in ancient Egypt she began to be regarded as a domestic cat rather than a lioness.
Here then we have a connection between ‘utchat’ and the domestic cat. The god Bast is well known. She was a ‘local diety’ situated in what is now known as Zagazig. Sacrifices were made to her in the form of deliberately killed kittens bred for the purpose – big business ancient Egyptian style.
The cat goddess Bast (or Bastet) became Pasht later on in Egypt (305 BC to 30 BC). From ‘Pasht’ the English words ‘puss’ and ‘pussy’ developed. Apparently there are other words for cats based on ‘pasht’ – past, pushd and pusst but I can’t find out more on this derivatives.
That’s it, basically. Perhaps the nearest modern word to ‘utchat’ is the French ‘chat’.
Associated: Origin of the word ‘meow’.
UPDATE May 2nd 2025! Some more on this topic. Inspired to do it by the comment below!
The word “cat” has a long and fascinating linguistic journey stretching across cultures and centuries. Here’s a concise tracing of its origin:
🐾 Etymology of “Cat”
- English “cat” comes from Old English catt (pronounced something like kaht).
- Old English catt is derived from Late Latin cattus (domestic cat), which began to replace the earlier Latin felis (wild or domestic cat).
- Cattus likely entered Latin from Afro-Asiatic languages via trade and cultural exchange routes:
- Coptic (a later Egyptian language): caute or caut
- Possibly from Ancient Egyptian: caut or caute (referring to a tomcat)
- The Egyptian connection is significant. Egypt was one of the first civilizations to domesticate cats (around 2000 BCE), and cats were deeply revered, often associated with the goddess Bastet.
- The word spread into European languages from Latin:
- Old High German: chazza
- Old Norse: kǫttr
- Old French: cat (leading to modern French chat)
- Across much of the world, similar-sounding words exist, such as:
- Spanish: gato
- Italian: gatto
- Arabic: qit or qittah
- Turkish: kedi
These cognates suggest a wide diffusion of the term along trade routes from the Near East and North Africa into Europe.
Summary
The English “cat” has roots in Latin, likely borrowed from Egyptian, and made its way into English via Old English and Germanic languages. It’s a case of a word traveling alongside the animal it describes—migrating, adapting, and evolving over thousands of years.
Would you like a visual timeline or map of this etymological journey?
“Summary
A word inherited from Germanic. Probably partly also a borrowing from French.
Cognate with Old Frisian katte (West Frisian kat), Middle Dutch catte, cat (Dutch kat; currency in Old Dutch may be implied by the place name Cathem), Middle Low German katte, Old High German kazza (feminine), kazzo (masculine) (Middle High German katze, German Katze), Old Icelandic kǫttr (masculine), ketta (feminine), Old Swedish katter (masculine; Swedish katt), Old Swedish katta (feminine; Swedish katta), Old Danish, Danish kat; further etymology uncertain (see discussion below).
In Middle English probably reinforced by Anglo-Norman cat, kat (12th cent.; also chat), corresponding to Old French, Middle French, French chat (12th cent.) < post-classical Latin cattus (see below).
Notes
Gender and stem class in Germanic languages
The gender and stem class show considerable variation in the Germanic languages; Old English has cat (masculine) and catte (feminine). An apparently early, but not fully explained, formation from the same stem is shown by Middle Dutch cāter (Dutch kater), Old Saxon kataro (Middle Low German kāter), Old High German kataro (Middle High German kater, katere, German Kater) male cat; it is uncertain whether this is connected with the first element of [the verb] caterwaul…
No related word is attested in Gothic (in which no word for cat is recorded [at all]).
Further etymology
Similar words denoting the cat are found in Germanic languages (excluding Gothic), Byzantine Greek, classical Latin (hence in Romance languages), Celtic languages, and Baltic and Slavonic languages, but the connection between them is unclear.
Considerations of word form show that they do not all go back to a shared Indo-European antecedent. The word is very possibly not of great antiquity in any of these language families.
Plausible attempts to identify an origin within either Germanic or Celtic have been made; alternatively, the word is often considered to be a loanword in all of these language families, very possibly having spread as recently as the first centuries of the first millennium A.D.
Words of broadly similar form have often been adduced from languages of North Africa such as Nubian or Berber, but also from Basque, Turkish, and Finnish. If, as sometimes thought, the word ultimately has an imitative origin, recalling the hissing sound made by a cat, then the same development could well have occurred independently in different languages at different times, and some or all of these resemblances could well be purely coincidental (as could some of those between different branches of Indo-European). Compare similarly meow int.
Attempts to link a narrative of the spread of the word with the geographical spread of the animal are also often countered by the argument that the word may originally have denoted a different animal.
Byzantine Greek had κάττα (in magical texts (possibly Hellenistic Greek) and various scholia) and later κάττος, as familiar terms corresponding to ancient Greek αἴλουρος; modern Greek has γάτα from Italian.
In post-classical Latin, both cattus (masculine) and catta (feminine) are attested from the 5th cent. (Classical Latin catta in Martial (Epigrams 13: 69) is almost certainly the name of a bird, and the same may also be true of the same form occurring in the Vulgate (Baruch 6:21, where Vetus Latina has gutae, probably to be read as gattae)…
Beside French chat, in other Romance languages compare: Old Occitan cat, gat, Catalan gat, Spanish gato, Portuguese gato, Italian gatto.
Compare in Celtic languages: Gaulish cattos (masculine; in names), Early Irish catt (masculine; Irish cat), Welsh cath (usually feminine), Old Cornish kat (feminine; Middle Cornish cath, Cornish kath), Middle Breton caz (masculine; Breton kazh).
Compare also in Slavonic languages: Russian kot, Czech regional kot, Bulgarian regional kot, Slovene kot, all in sense ‘male cat’, Polish kot male or female cat; also, in Baltic languages, Lithuanian katė cat.“
Oxford English Dictionary, “cat (n.1), Etymology,” March 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5285658685.
Good idea Ruth. I would be nice to add a bit more to this to put some more detail on the development of the word. I’ll have a look at that.
I wonder what the OED has to say on the earliest usage of the word “cat” in the English language. I’ve never looked up such a simple word in there before. I last looked up kidney to see which came first, the kidney or the bean, (it was the organ, not the bean which came into the language first) and I looked up “bubbler” which is what we call a drinking fountain here in Milwaukee. It was in there. Naughty words are fun to look up in the OED, because often they didn’t start out with vulgar connotations, but were in every day usage. So I wonder when the words meow and cat first appeared in writing in the English language? If you don’t look it up, Michael, maybe I will if I ever manage to get to a library again. You have to pay to access the entire Oxford English Dictionary online and I’ve never felt like forking over the money when I can use the hard copy version (all 21 volumes or so) in the library.