tabbyhood

tabbyhood

English

Etymology

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

Noun

tabbyhood (plural tabbyhoods)

1. (dated) The state of being an adult female cat.
   • 1913, Piano Trade Magazine, page 264:

     You know, an old she-cat with a mess of kittens growing up to Tom and Tabbyhood will, at some certain period of their career, bring in a mouse and let her offspring play with the poor creature until they acquire the taste for mice.

   • 1920, The Ladies' Home Journal, page 37:

     When Sterling came round and picked us up in his car to run us out to Cellini's for tea, I was purring like an old tabby myself with a hot stove and saucer of cream guaranteed for the rest of her tabbyhood.

2. (dated) The state of being a spinster.
   • 1824 January, “The Yourth of Reginald Dalton”, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, volume 15, page 115:

     ...to have gained both bachelor's prizes and have beat Professor Sandford, in competition for a Fellowship at Oriel; then to have become college tutor—embued the rising generation for six years with classical literature and philosophy —married a wife verging on her tabbyhood, and retired, without any reasonable prospect of a family, to read Jeremy Taylor in a snug living of ₤1000 a-year.

   • 2013 spring, Bobbie Ann Mason, “The Horsehair Ball Gown”, in The Virginia Quarterly Review, volume 89, number 2, page 93:

     Isabella herself, being unmarried, had led a life of tabbyhood—one of their mother's quainter terms.

   • 2019, Charlotte Biggs, A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, page 105:

     I know if I venture to add a word in defence of Tabbyhood, I shall be engaged in a war with yourself and all our young acquaintance; yet in this age, which so liberally “softens, and blends, and weakens, and dilutes” away all distinctions, I own I am not without some partiality for strong lines of demarcation, and, perhaps, when fifty retrogrades into fifteen, it makes a worse confusion in society than the toe of the peasant treading on the heel of the courtier.