cat lady

English

A cat lady feeding strays in Rome.

Pronunciation

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

Noun

cat lady (plural cat ladies)

1. (informal, sometimes derogatory) A woman, often elderly, who devotes her time and attention to one or usually many domestic cats.

   Hypernym: catlover

   • 2009 March 19, Jessica Fargen, “Cops: Lady froze her cats again”, in Boston Herald‎^[1]:

     Beacon Hill’s notorious cat lady was in the spotlight again yesterday after an angry confrontation with cops who say they found at least two dead felines in her freezer following a brief standoff at her Plymouth home.

   • 2009 November, Suzanne Mullett, ABC News‎^[2]:

     The most common is a female character. Single of course, lamenting that she can never own a cat because once you have one you won't be far away from being the cat lady of the neighborhood.

   • 2023 October 3, Sirin Kale, “Purring, parasites and pure love: what exactly makes someone a cat person?”, in The Guardian‎^[3], →ISSN:

     We all know the stereotype of the crazy cat lady who lives alone in a home that smells of stale litter. But how unjust is it really?

   • 2024 July 25, Catherine Shoard, quoting JD Vance, “Jennifer Aniston criticises JD Vance’s ‘childless cat ladies’ comment”, in The Guardian‎^[4], →ISSN:

     Aniston was responding to recently resurfaced 2021 comments by Vance, who told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the US was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Translations

elderly lady who devotes her attention to cats

• French: femme à chats (fr) f
• Hungarian: macskás nő
• Italian: gattara (it) f
• Japanese: ^{(please verify)} 猫おばさん (ねこおばさん, neko obasan)
• Macedonian: мачкарка f (mačkarka)
• Spanish: loca de los gatos f

Further reading

• cat lady on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Anagrams

• adactyl