What does catting mean?
Catting is the present participle of the verb "cat," and its meanings depend heavily on context and register. In everyday British slang it most commonly means vomiting — as when someone who has drunk too much ends up catting outside a pub — making it a blunt, informal alternative to words like puking or throwing up. Applied to tomcats, it describes the noisy nocturnal behavior of males roaming in search of a mate, which is thought to underlie the slang sense itself. In modern computing culture, catting means displaying the contents of a file using the Unix cat command, so a programmer might say they were catting through log files to find an error. The phrase "catting about" or "catting around" adds yet another shade: drifting about or behaving irresponsibly. Because every sense is colloquial or technical, catting suits casual conversation and specialist jargon rather than formal prose, but within those settings it is vivid, economical, and instantly understood.
verb (present participle)The present participle of "cat": chiefly British slang meaning to vomit; also used informally of cats to mean searching for a sexual partner, and in computing slang meaning to display a file's contents using the cat command.
- (of a person) vomiting; being sick (British slang).
- (of a male cat) roaming in search of a mate.
- (computing, informal) displaying the contents of one or more files with the cat command.
- wandering about aimlessly or engaging in casual socializing (in phrases like "catting about").
"He'd drunk far too much lager and spent half the night catting in the alley behind the pub."
"After that dodgy takeaway curry, he was catting all night long."
"I was just catting through some old log files looking for the error."
In Unix circles, "catting a file" has nothing to do with animals — it's shorthand for running the cat command to dump a file's contents to your screen.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of catting
As the participial form of "cat," the word ultimately traces back through Old English "catt" to Late Latin "cattus," the common Romance and Germanic root for the domestic feline. The verb "to cat" arose by conversion from the noun: first describing the mating wanderings of tomcats, then extended in British slang to human vomiting, presumably by analogy with the retching noises and general disreputableness associated with yowling alley cats. The computing sense derives independently from the name of the Unix program cat, short for "concatenate."
Related word forms
How catting is actually used
All senses are informal: the vomiting sense is chiefly British colloquial speech and would be out of place in formal writing; the computing sense is insider jargon among programmers and system administrators; the feline-mating sense is largely literary or humorous.
Easily confused with catting
"Cattle" refers to domesticated bovine animals, whereas "catting" is either the act of vomiting or the behavior of tomcats seeking mates.