cat lady
8
7.3
- noun
- /kæt ˈleɪdi/
- Offensive
:
loca de los gatos
- She proudly calls herself a cat lady because she has rescued over ten cats from the shelter.
- a crazy cat lady
- a real cat lady
- become a cat lady
To describe myself in three words, I would say crazy cat lady.
- To describe myself in three words, I would say crazy cat lady.
- And these men are terrified of this because everybody knows Taylor Swift is a wildly successful, childless cat lady.
- I I think his statement on cat ladies was misguided.
- Yeah, that's the cat lady wine box.
- You had a child with cat lady Lindsey Graham.
- Was JD Vance right about childless cat ladies?
- He's called Tim, you know, I mean, he's called JD Vance, weird, this cat lady stuff, which they keep repeating.
- Until then, stop telling other people what to do with their lives and never mess with chargeless cat ladies.
Examples
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I'm a 30-something feminist vegetarian quickly becoming a cat lady.
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And here I was worried you were gonna end up becoming a cat lady like me.
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We are going to be two crazy cat ladies, crazy cat couple.
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We're going to put this advice from the cat lady into action.
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Wait, does this make me a cat lady?
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You still went with the cat lady.
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Does this officially make us cat ladies?
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Didn't figure you for a cat lady.
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It looks like I may be stuck being a cat lady...
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So needy, so self-involved, yet you get fond of them, and before you know it, you're like a crazy cat lady spending all your time cleaning up after them and feeding them.
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Synonyms
A person who breeds and cares for cats as a hobby
How Cat-Loving
- Offensive
8
7.3
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun is compositionally built from 'cat' + 'lady', so a B1 learner who knows both words will readily infer it refers to a woman associated with cats (e.g. who owns or likes cats). However, the fuller idiomatic stereotype — that she owns many cats and is eccentric or socially awkward — is a cultural/pragmatic nuance not fully predictable from the constituents alone, so the expression is only partially transparent.
Etymology
Cat lady comes from the picture of a woman whose home is full of cats. Because people often saw such women as lonely or a little strange, the phrase now means 'a woman who owns many cats' and is seen as 'eccentric'.