tabby
Definitions
General English
- noun a cat with brown or orange stripes
Construction
- A type of concrete consisting of a mixture of lime and water, with shells, gravel, or stones used to make blocks for masonry.
Slang
- noun a female, especially an attractive and/or lively girl
Origin & History of “tabby”
By a bizarre series of etymological twists and turns, the tabby cat commemorates a textile manufacturing suburb of Baghdad. this was al-‘Attābīya, named after prince Attāb, who lived there. The cloth made there was known as ‘attābī, and the term passed via Old French atabis and modern French tabis into English as tabby. This originally denoted a sort of rich silk taffeta (‘This day … put on … my false tabby waistcoat with gold lace’ noted Samuel Pepys in his diary for 13 October 1661), but since such cloth was originally usually striped, by the 1660s the word was being applied to brindled cats.
