Fact or Folklore? Phrase origins
Where does “no room to swing a cat” come from?
The short answer
Nobody knows what the cat was. The popular story says it was the cat-o’-nine-tails, a whip that was too long to swing below deck.
But the saying is in print by 1632, in a London law book on women’s legal rights, and the whip’s name is in print by 1672, about forty years later. For the whip story to work, it would have to be the other way round.
The verdicts, claim by claim
- FOLKLORE
The cat-o’-nine-tails whip story (too cramped below deck to swing the whip)
In the video: Verdict: myth.
The saying is in print by 1632 (The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights, p. 100). The whip’s name is in print by 1672 (Cataplus), about forty years later. The story runs backwards.
Note: Our video gives 1665; later digging found 1632. The verdict is unchanged.
How we label. FACT: the record backs the story. FOLKLORE: a dated page we opened contradicts the story (it labels the story, never the phrase). UNPROVEN: could be true, can’t be shown. The videos use plainer words (solid, myth, false, plausible, rumour); each is shown here under one of these three labels.
The story
Royal Museums Greenwich has a page of nautical phrases. Next to “swing a cat” it says, with no hedge, that the cat isn’t a feline but a whip, and that it was usually too cramped below deck to swing one.
1632: a law book for women
The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights (London, 1632) is a guide to the law as it touched women. In Book II, Section 61, on what a widow can and can’t claim as dower, page 100 asks: “But how if the Common and all things bee so inclosed that there is not roome to swing a Cat in…”
We viewed the page image ourselves, in the Internet Archive’s scan of the Early English Books microfilm. The quotation is typed from the Text Creation Partnership’s keyed text, with the old long s printed as a modern s.
No ship in sight. It’s a complaint about land fenced off so tightly there’s no space left.
1665: already “the vulgar saying”
Richard Kephale’s Medela Pestilentiae (London, 1665), a book about the plague, describes a family living in one room that “look’d more like, for bigness, a great Chest.” On page 57 he says they had “not space enough (according to the vulgar saying) to swing a Cat in.”
“The vulgar saying” means the common saying. By 1665 it was an everyday expression, again about a crowded room on land.
The whip, about forty years later
The whip’s name is in print by 1672. A verse parody of that year, Cataplus, has wretches whipped by the hangman “With Cat a nine tails, until blood / Shall run down sides in purple flood.” We read that in the text of the Internet Archive’s scan; we haven’t viewed the page image. Two years later, John Josselyn’s An Account of Two Voyages to New-England (1674), p. 6, describes a young servant on his 1638 voyage “whipt naked at the Cap-stern, with a Cat with Nine tails.”
The best-known example, though not the first, is William Congreve’s play Love for Love (1695), Act III, where Ben the sailor tells off a young woman: “if you shou’d give such Language at Sea, you’d have a Cat o’ Nine-tails laid cross your Shoulders.”
“Cat” on its own, meaning the whip, turns up more than a hundred years after the saying, according to the Oxford English Dictionary as reported by Grammarphobia. The record has the saying first and the whip later.
What the cat really was, nobody knows. Every other theory is a guess.
Sources
- The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights: or, The Lawes Provision for Woemen, London, 1632 (STC 7437), Book II, Sect. LXI, p. 100: “there is not roome to swing a Cat in.” Page image viewed. Page image: Internet Archive item bim_early-english-books-1475-1640_the-lawes-resolutions-of_e-t_1632, page n115 (Early English Books microfilm; no rights field, so no image is shown here). Quotation: EEBO-TCP Phase I keyed text A21071 (CC0 1.0). archive.org github.com
- Richard Kephale, Medela Pestilentiae, London, 1665, p. 57. Page scan read. Internet Archive item bim_early-english-books-1641-1700_medela-pestilenti-wher_kephale-richard_1665 (Early English Books microfilm; no reuse terms stated, so no scan is shown here). archive.org
- Cataplus: or, Aeneas his Descent to Hell, London, 1672: “With Cat a nine tails, until blood / Shall run down sides in purple flood.” Read in the scan’s text; page image not viewed. Internet Archive item bim_early-english-books-1641-1700_cataplus_a-m_1672 (Early English Books microfilm; no rights field). archive.org
- John Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages to New-England, London, 1674, p. 6. Text checked in the 1865 literal reprint. Project Gutenberg eBook #66922. gutenberg.org
- William Congreve, Love for Love, London, 1695, Act III, p. 36. Page scan read. Internet Archive item bim_early-english-books-1641-1700_love-for-love_congreve-william_1695_0 (Early English Books microfilm; no reuse terms stated). archive.org
- “Cat” alone for the whip: the Oxford English Dictionary, as reported by Grammarphobia (2006) and The Phrase Finder.
- The claim under test: Royal Museums Greenwich, “The nautical origins of everyday phrases.” Text only. Royal Museums Greenwich. rmg.co.uk
Last checked: . Corrections: none yet.
No page scans are reproduced on this site. Quotations are typed from the sources listed.