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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
catty
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Joyce made a catty comment about Sonia's clothes.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Deana Davenport, of course, and her catty comment had been somewhat inaccurate.
▪ So jealous, so catty, so, well, murderous, when scorned?
▪ Summoning the presence not to say something catty, I said something silly.
▪ The catty rumor was that the only reason Oseary got his job was that he was her boyfriend.
▪ The office of the chairman was noted for its catty animosities.
▪ There would be whispers at the church socials, catty remarks behind her back in the supermarket aisles.
▪ When a rival female lawyer makes a catty comment about her shade of lipstick, she totally flips out.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Catty

Catty \Cat"ty\, n. [Malay kat[=i]. See Caddy.] An East Indian Weight of 11/3 pounds.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
catty

1886, "devious and spiteful," from cat (n.) + -y (2). Slightly earlier was cattish. Meaning "pertaining to cats" is from 1902. Related: Cattily; cattiness.

Wiktionary
catty

Etymology 1 a. 1 (context informal of a person or remark English) With subtle hostility in an effort to hurt, annoy(,) or upset, particularly among women. 2 (context informal English) Resembling or characteristic of a cat. Etymology 2

n. A (unit of) weight used in China, generally standardized as half a kilogram.

WordNet
catty
  1. adj. marked by or arising from malice; "a catty remark" [syn: bitchy, cattish]

  2. [also: cattiest, cattier]

catty
  1. n. any of various units of weight used in southeastern Asia (especially a Chinese measure equal to 500 grams) [syn: cattie]

  2. [also: cattiest, cattier]

Wikipedia
Catty

The catty or kati ( in Singaporean English), symbol , is a traditional Chinese unit of mass used across East and Southeast Asia, notably for weighing food and other groceries in some wet markets, street markets, and shops. Related units include the picul, equal to 100 catties, and the tael (also spelled tahil, in Malay / Indonesian), which is of a catty. A stone is a former unit used in Hong Kong equal to 120 catties and a gwan (鈞) is 30 catties. Catty or kati is still used in South East Asia as a unit of measurement in some contexts especially by the significant Overseas Chinese populations of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.

The catty is traditionally equivalent to around 1⅓ pound avoirdupois, formalised as 604.78982 grams in Hong Kong, 604.79 grams in Malaysia and 604.8 grams in Singapore. In some countries, the weight has been rounded to 600 grams ( Taiwan and Thailand). In mainland China, the catty has been rounded to 500 grams and is referred to as the market catty (市斤 shìjīn) in order to distinguish it from the "metric catty" (公斤 gōngjīn), or kilogram, and it is subdivided into 10 taels rather than the usual 16.

Usage examples of "catty".

Audrey for her stoicism in the face of disaster and her finely tuned ballet technique, some of the cattier members of the class must have made snide remarks about her painfully bony look.

To make things worse, the weight of the sheng had been reduced with the times from twelve catties to five catties, and at the same time the relation of cash to silver had fallen from 1640 to 1250 cash the tael.

We had the misfortune of being stuck in a class packed with the cattiest little girls in all of New York City.

It is the story of great men--Morse, Thomson, Bell, Marconi, and others--and how, with the aid of men like Field, Vail, Catty, Pupin, the scientist, and others in both the technical and commercial fields, they succeeded in flashing both messages and speech around the world, with wires and without wires.

She watched Danny cross the street catty corner and lope to her house.

Betty Blum begins to take blame and croon apologies in the familiar catty pussyfooting of one browbeaten señora coming to the defense of another.