"Cat got your tongue?" is what you say to someone, usually a child, who has gone quiet when they are expected to answer. The popular story says the cat is the cat-o'-nine-tails, the knotted whip used to flog sailors, and that a flogged man was too shocked to speak.
No reference supports that story. The earliest known uses of the phrase are in American newspapers and magazines from 1859 and 1881, in domestic settings, and the 1881 one says outright that it is something "the children say." Phrase Finder puts it bluntly: there is no shred of evidence for the whip story or for the ancient Egyptian one that sometimes replaces it. The true origin is unknown.
What the phrase means and how it is used
The question is a tease or a mild rebuke. It asks why someone is not talking, and it assumes they could talk if they wanted to.
- You were full of opinions at dinner. What happened, cat got your tongue?
- "Well? Cat got your tongue?" the teacher asked.
It almost always appears as a question, and the auxiliary is often dropped: "Cat got your tongue?" rather than "Has the cat got your tongue?"
| Register | Region | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|
| (has the) cat got your tongue? | casual, teasing. Said to children it is playful; said to an adult it can sound condescending | both US and UK. Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Catch Phrases labels it "Brit. and US" | current |
Keep it out of business writing. Asking a colleague in an email whether the cat has got their tongue reads as a jab, however friendly you meant it.
Three references, three earliest dates
Here is the part most origin pages skip. The references do not agree on when the phrase was first written down, and the disagreement is instructive.
| Date | Source | Wording | Reported by |
|---|---|---|---|
| December 1859 | The Racine Democrat, Wisconsin | "Oh ho! The cat got your tongue has it?" was his next remark. | Phrase Finder |
| 1881 | Ballou's Monthly Magazine, Boston | "Has the cat got your tongue, as the children say?" | History.com |
| 1911 | Henry Howard Harper, Bob Hardwick (a novel) | "Has the cat got your tongue?" | Grammarphobia, quoting the Oxford English Dictionary |
A few notes on the table, because each row has a caveat.
The 1859 Racine Democrat line is the earliest date any reference we read gives. It rests on Phrase Finder alone. We did not open the newspaper.
The 1881 Ballou's line is quoted by History.com, which prints the magazine's name as "Bayou's" in one place. The magazine is Ballou's Monthly Magazine, a Boston monthly, and a search of Google Books' index lists an 1881 volume of it among the books that contain the question. We saw the index entry, not the page.
The 1911 date comes from Grammarphobia's February 2011 post, which reports that the OED's citations for the phrase are "surprisingly recent," with Harper's novel as the earliest. The OED revises its entries, so its first date may have moved since. What the post shows is how easily a major dictionary can miss an earlier newspaper use, not that the phrase began in 1911.
Partridge's Dictionary of Catch Phrases dates it more loosely, as a catch phrase from the middle of the nineteenth century onward. That fits the 1859 and 1881 citations.
Why the navy whip story fails
History.com calls the cat-o'-nine-tails explanation "probably the most popular" of the folk etymologies. It is also the easiest to test, and it fails on three counts.
There is no citation. No reference we read produces a single early use of the phrase in a naval setting, from a sailor, or about punishment. The story has a vivid picture and no documents. Phrase Finder's verdict covers it and the Egyptian story together: "there's no shred of evidence to support either of them."
The earliest settings are the wrong ones. The first uses on record are a remark in a Wisconsin newspaper and a line in a family magazine that attributes the question to children. If the phrase came from the lower deck, you would expect to find it in sea stories and naval memoirs first, and to see it reach the nursery later. The record runs the other way.
The logic does not hold. The question is a tease about keeping quiet. A man who has just been flogged is not quiet because something took his tongue, and nobody would ask him whether it had. The story explains the word "cat" and nothing else in the sentence.
The same whip turns up in the cat-o'-nine-tails theory attached to "let the cat out of the bag", where Phrase Finder also finds it the weaker explanation. A single object offered as the source of two unrelated cat phrases is itself a warning sign. It suggests people starting from the word "cat" and looking for a cat, rather than starting from the evidence.
The other stories, and what they have in common
Ancient Egypt. In this version, liars or blasphemers had their tongues cut out and fed to cats. History.com reports that Egyptologists have found no surviving evidence of such a practice. Grammarphobia agrees that there is no evidence liars in ancient times had their tongues fed to cats. And a practice in ancient Egypt would still leave the problem of how an English phrase first recorded in 1859 inherited it.
Witches. Cats were thought to be witches' familiars, and a familiar might steal your voice. History.com notes that the cat-and-witch link is well documented as a belief but that nothing ties it to this phrase, which does not appear in the record during the height of the European witch trials. It is the same move that attaches the witches' familiars offered for "raining cats and dogs": a real belief about cats, connected to a phrase by nothing but the presence of a cat.
A playful image for children. The least dramatic explanation is the one Phrase Finder prefers. Cats steal things, including food off the table, and a grown-up teasing a silent child asks whether the cat has made off with their tongue. Phrase Finder calls it whimsical imagery of the nursery-rhyme kind, not a reference to any real object or event. History.com lists this reading too.
That last reading is not proven either. It is simply the only one that fits the earliest settings the record shows. Fitting the evidence is not the same as being documented, and the honest answer to "where does it come from?" is still "nobody knows."
What the three dramatic stories share is the pattern described in how a phrase origin is traced: each begins from the words, invents a scene that would produce them, and then presents the scene as history. The whip, the Egyptian temple and the witch all make "cat" literal and sinister. None of them comes with a date. The coffin-bell story behind "dead ringer" works the same way: a grim scene invented to explain an ordinary word.
A parallel in French
Grammarphobia points to a French idiom that also puts a cat and a tongue together: je donne ma langue au chat, also je jette ma langue au chat, "I give my tongue to the cat," meaning "I give up, I can't guess." The meaning is different. The French speaker volunteers the tongue in order to stop guessing; the English speaker is accused of having lost it. But the pairing shows that the image of a cat taking a tongue is ordinary and playful in more than one language, and does not need a flogging or a sacrifice to explain it.
We report the French parallel as Grammarphobia gives it. No reference we read claims that one phrase came from the other.
What is genuinely unresolved
The origin is unknown. No reference names one, and every specific story in circulation lacks evidence.
The earliest date is open. 1859 is the earliest any reference we read offers, and it rests on one source. Earlier uses may exist in newspapers that have not been searched.
The children's-tease reading is a best fit, not a finding. It matches the early settings. It has no document behind it either.
Frequently asked questions
Where does "cat got your tongue" come from?
Nobody knows. The earliest known uses are American: Phrase Finder cites The Racine Democrat of Wisconsin in December 1859, and History.com cites Ballou's Monthly Magazine in 1881, which calls it something "the children say." Phrase Finder reads it as a whimsical image used with children, not a reference to a real event, but that reading is not documented either.
Does it come from the cat-o'-nine-tails whip?
No evidence supports it. No reference produces an early use of the phrase in a naval setting, and the first recorded uses are domestic. Phrase Finder says there is no shred of evidence for the whip story, or for the story about tongues fed to cats in ancient Egypt.
When was "cat got your tongue" first recorded?
It depends on the reference. Phrase Finder gives December 1859, History.com gives 1881, and Grammarphobia's 2011 post reports the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation as 1911, from Henry Howard Harper's novel Bob Hardwick. The 1859 date is the earliest we found, and it rests on Phrase Finder alone.
Is it rude to say "cat got your tongue"?
It is casual and teasing. With a child it is usually playful. With an adult, especially at work, it can come across as condescending, so it is best kept to relaxed conversation with people who know you well.
