The word **tabby** connects a Baghdad silk workshop to the markings on a house cat. Its journey from Arabic textile term to English feline vocabulary spans a thousand years of trade and metaphor.
## The Fabric
The story begins in medieval Baghdad, in a quarter called al-ʿAttābiyya, named after Prince ʿAttāb ibn Asīd of the Umayyad dynasty. This district was known for producing a distinctive watered silk — a fabric with a rippled, moiré pattern created by pressing the material with heated rollers. Arabic called this fabric *ʿattābī* after its place of manufacture.
The word traveled west along trade routes. It entered Medieval Latin as *attābī*, then French as *tabis*, and reached English by the 1630s as *tabby* or *tabi*. In its textile sense, tabby referred specifically to silk taffeta with a watered or wavy finish. Samuel Pepys recorded buying tabby fabric in his diary. The
The leap from fabric to feline happened in the late 17th century. The striped, swirled, or mottled pattern on certain cats' coats resembled the watered pattern of tabby silk. English speakers began calling such cats *tabby cats*, and by the 18th century, *tabby* alone sufficed. The textile meaning faded almost
This type of meaning transfer — from a patterned material to the animal bearing a similar pattern — has parallels. *Calico* cats take their name from calico cloth (originally from Calicut, India). The pattern, not the material, is what jumps from object to animal.
Modern genetics has revealed that the tabby pattern is the ancestral coat marking of all domestic cats. The gene responsible, called *Taqpep*, produces the characteristic stripes, spots, or whorls. Cats that appear solid-colored actually carry the tabby gene — a separate gene simply masks its expression. This means every house cat is, genetically speaking, a tabby.
The mackerel tabby (narrow stripes) represents the wild-type pattern closest to the African wildcat, *Felis lybica*, from which all domestic cats descend. The blotched or classic tabby (wide swirling patches) is a mutation that became common in medieval Europe.
Before settling on its feline definition, *tabby* accumulated other meanings. An old maid was sometimes called a *tabby* in 18th-century slang — a use that may have combined the cat association with a derogatory sense of an elderly, gossipy woman. In building construction, *tabby* refers to a type of concrete made from oyster shells, lime, sand, and water, common in the coastal American South. This architectural *tabby* has a different origin, probably from Spanish *tapia* (mud wall
The word's dominant meaning today is firmly feline. When someone says 'tabby,' they mean a cat with stripes — a meaning born from the chance resemblance between a Baghdad silk and the coat of a common house cat.