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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
tabby
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a tabby cat (=which has dark and light lines on brown or grey fur)
▪ They had a 12-year-old tabby cat.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ He was a long-haired tabby she had found in the kitchen garden, old and nearly dead from starvation.
▪ Not even a sinister black cat, but a large and lazy-looking tabby.
▪ On the front cover, a dilute tabby looks nobly if nervously to its right.
▪ The first cats of this type were what we today call striped or mackerel tabby, covered with thin, dark lines.
▪ The two-year-old tabby was horrifically injured in a road accident.
▪ This tabby was no cheap date.
▪ This, it seems, is how the history of the tabby began.
▪ Within an old tabby wall are the grounds of the Stafford house, burned down over a hundred years ago.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Tabby

Tabby \Tab"by\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Tabbied; p. pr. & vb. n. Tabbying.] To water; to cause to look wavy, by the process of calendering; to calender; as, to tabby silk, mohair, ribbon, etc.

Tabby

Tabby \Tab"by\, n.; pl. Tabbies. [F. tabis (cf. It. tab[`i], Sp. & Pg. tab['i], LL. attabi), fr. Ar. 'att[=a]b[=i], properly the name of a quarter of Bagdad where it was made, the quarter being named from the prince Attab, great grandson of Omeyya. Cf. Tobine.]

  1. A kind of waved silk, usually called watered silk, manufactured like taffeta, but thicker and stronger. The watering is given to it by calendering.

  2. A mixture of lime with shells, gravel, or stones, in equal proportions, with an equal proportion of water. When dry, this becomes as hard as rock.
    --Weale.

  3. A brindled cat; hence, popularly, any cat.

  4. An old maid or gossip. [Colloq.]
    --Byron.

Tabby

Tabby \Tab"by\, a.

  1. Having a wavy or watered appearance; as, a tabby waistcoat.
    --Pepys.

  2. Brindled; diversified in color; as, a tabby cat.

    Tabby moth (Zo["o]l.), the grease moth. See under Grease.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
tabby

1630s, "striped silk taffeta," from French tabis "a rich, watered silk" (originally striped), from Middle French atabis (14c.), from Arabic 'attabi, from 'Attabiyah, a neighborhood of Baghdad where such cloth was made, said to be named for prince 'Attab of the Omayyad dynasty. As an adjective from 1630s.\n

\nTabby cat, one with a striped coat, is attested from 1690s; shortened form tabby first attested 1774. "The wild original of the domestic cat is always of such coloration" [Century Dictionary]. Sense of "female cat" (1826) may be influenced by the fem. proper name Tabby, a pet form of Tabitha, which was used in late 18c. as slang for "spiteful spinster, difficult old woman."

Wiktionary
tabby

a. 1 Having a wavy or watered appearance; as, a tabby waistcoat. 2 Brindled; diversified in color; as, a tabby cat. n. 1 (context uncountable English) A kind of waved silk, usually called watered silk, manufactured like taffeta, but thicker and stronger. The watering is given to it by calendering. 2 (context uncountable English) A mixture of lime with shells, gravel, or stones, in equal proportions, with an equal proportion of water. When dry, this becomes as hard as rock. 3 (context countable English) A brindled cat. 4 (context countable archaic English) An old maid or gossip.

WordNet
tabby
  1. n. a cat with a gray or tawny coat mottled with black [syn: tabby cat]

  2. female cat [syn: queen]

tabby

adj. having a gray or brown streak or a pattern or a patchy coloring; used especially of the patterned fur of cats [syn: brindled, brindle, brinded]

Wikipedia
Tabby (disambiguation)

A tabby is a cat with a distinctive coat.

Tabby may also refer to:

  • Tabby concrete, a building material
  • Tabby Cat (solitaire), a card game
  • Tabby Callaghan, a musician
  • OSVehicle Tabby, an open source vehicle design
  • Tabby weave, a fundamental textile pattern
  • A character in the .hack//Roots anime series
  • A character in Monster Warriors
  • A nickname for the Tabernacle, a concert venue in Atlanta
  • A nickname for the name Tabitha
  • The Allied reporting name for the Showa L2D, a Japanese-built copy of the Douglas DC-3 aircraft
  • Tabbies, a nickname for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League

Usage examples of "tabby".

Here Art is no benignant goddess, but a Circe who turns her wooers into mewing Toms and Tabbies who linger about the doorsteps of her abode, unmindful of the flying brickbats and boot-jacks of the critics.

Then Chaos, the long-haired tabby, jumped down and sauntered past Fiddlesticks into the house.

The sign featuring a painting of the famous slumbering orange tabby swayed and creaked in the evening breeze.

Those counter-changed tabbies in the air, The sun once set, all of one colour are: So, when death comes, fresh tinctures lose their place, And dismal darkness then doth smutch the face.

He had the window open and was lifting a small, bedraggled cat over the sill, a tabby cat, badly in need of a good grooming, with round eyes and an anxious look.

Tabby or Tappy, I noticed, was still waiting for her husband, who, if he existed at all, was probably on a business trip out of town.

He led the way into a large, grand room, its grandness made cosy by a tabby cat curled up on one of the enormous sofas, a tangle of knitting cast down untidily on a table and a pile of books and magazines on a sofa table.

Eulalie sat at the table in the bedroom and sipped her cassina tea, made from the leaves of the bushes that grew near the tabby house.

The tabby that had been run off by the Sydney Ducks found her again and was not at all put off by her fish perfume.

Admiral Antonov and the Tabby were right about Theban underestimation of dieir capabilities.

Next came the orange tabby, skipping eagerly forward on its hindlegs, rushing through the door.

They were as far removed from Leadfoot Sam as a tiger is from a tabby cat, and proportionately more dangerous.

Having cleaned her offspring, bitten through the umbilicals, and eaten the afterbirths, consumption of which stimulated her lactation, the brownish tabby now was in a third bout of labor.

It was fortunate that the Tabby was junior to Demosthenes Waldeck but senior to every other Allied officer present, for his five fleet carriers, eight battlecruisers, and five heavy cruisers were the largest Allied contingent yet to reach Sarasota.

None of the CVLs had any fighters, the battlecruisers' magazines were less than two-thirds filled, and two battleships still had repair techs aboard, but they all mounted third-generation ECM, and the Tabbies had it on-line in deception mode.