The English word “cat” traces back to Old English *catt* or *catte*, which itself came from Late Latin *cattus*. But the deeper origin is what makes this word unusual: it likely didn’t originate in any European language at all. Linguists believe it was borrowed from a North African or Afroasiatic source, traveling into Europe alongside the domestic cat itself.
The Earliest European Appearance
The word first shows up in written European records around 75 C.E., when the Roman poet Martial used the Latin form *catta*. By around 350 C.E., Byzantine Greek had adopted *katta*. Before these forms appeared, Latin speakers used *feles* (the root of “feline”) and Greeks called cats *ailouros*, a word that probably meant “quick-moving tail” and likely referred only to wildcats, since domestic cats weren’t yet common in the Greek world.
By around 700 C.E., *cattus* and its variants had spread across the European continent, effectively replacing the older Latin *feles* as the everyday word for a domestic cat. This timing lines up with the period when domestic cats became widespread household animals in Europe, suggesting the new word traveled with the animal.
How It Reached English
Old English inherited *catt* from this continental Latin word, possibly reinforced by Old French *chat*. The University of Michigan’s Middle English Dictionary records the word appearing in texts from the early 1200s onward, with spellings including *cat*, *catte*, *kat*, and *katte*. One of the earliest recorded uses, from around 1200, describes a wife hearing her child scream after “the cat ate the bacon.” Another, from around 1250, notes that “the cat knows but one trick,” referring to a cat protecting its gray fur.
The same root word spread across nearly every European language. German has *Katze*, Dutch *kat*, Swedish *katt*, Spanish *gato*, French *chat*, Italian *gatto*, and Russian *kot*. This near-universal agreement across unrelated language families is a strong signal that they all borrowed the word from a single outside source rather than developing it independently.
The North African Theory
So where did Latin *cattus* come from? The leading theory points to North Africa, which makes sense given that cats were first domesticated in the Near East and North Africa thousands of years before they became common in Europe. Several Afroasiatic languages have strikingly similar words: Nubian *kaddîska* means “wildcat,” Nobiin (another Nubian language) has *kadīs*, and Berber has *kadiska*. Arabic *qiṭṭa* also belongs to this cluster.
The exact direction of borrowing is debated. The linguist Adolphe Pictet and many later scholars pointed to the Nubian words as possible sources, but others, including M. Lionel Bender, have argued that the Nubian forms were themselves borrowed from Arabic. This chicken-and-egg problem hasn’t been fully resolved. What most linguists do agree on is that the word is “probably ultimately Afroasiatic,” even if the specific source language remains uncertain.
Why There’s No Ancient Root
Most basic English animal words, like “hound,” “mouse,” or “cow,” can be traced back thousands of years to reconstructed Proto-Indo-European roots. “Cat” is different. There is no well-established Proto-Indo-European root for it, and the reason is straightforward: the ancient peoples who spoke Proto-Indo-European (roughly 4500 to 2500 B.C.E.) didn’t keep domestic cats. The animal and its name arrived in Europe together, both as imports.
Some scholars have proposed a connection to a Proto-Indo-European root *mit-*, but this remains speculative and isn’t widely accepted. The consensus view treats “cat” as a wandering loanword, a term that jumped from language to language as the animal spread through trade routes and human migration. Words like this are called *Wanderwörter* in linguistics, and they’re relatively common for traded goods and imported animals.
Other English Words for Cats
English also has “puss” and “pussy” (in the cat sense), which have a separate and equally murky history. These forms have parallels in Dutch *poes*, Norwegian *puse*, and Irish *pus*, and some linguists trace them to a different Proto-Indo-European root. “Kitten” comes from Anglo-Norman *kitoun*, a diminutive of Old French *chat*. And “tabby,” for a striped cat, derives from a type of striped silk originally made in a district of Baghdad.
The word “cat” has also generated a remarkable number of idioms and slang terms over the centuries, from “cat nap” and “copycat” to jazz-era “cool cat.” But the core word itself has remained almost unchanged for over a thousand years in English, and for nearly two thousand years in Europe, a rare example of a borrowed word so successful that it conquered an entire continent’s vocabulary.