tabbyhood

English

Etymology

From tabby +‎ -hood.

Noun

tabbyhood (uncountable)

1. (dated) The state of being an adult female cat (a tabby).
   • 1913, Piano Trade Magazine, page 264:

     You know, an old she-cat with a mess of kittens growing up to Tom and Tabbyhood will, at some certain period of their career, bring in a mouse and let her offspring play with the poor creature until they acquire the taste for mice.

   • 1920, The Ladies' Home Journal, page 37:

     When Sterling came round and picked us up in his car to run us out to Cellini's for tea, I was purring like an old tabby myself with a hot stove and saucer of cream guaranteed for the rest of her tabbyhood.

2. (dated) The state of being a spinster.
   • 1824 January, “The Yourth of Reginald Dalton”, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, volume 15, page 115:

     ...to have gained both bachelor's prizes and have beat Professor Sandford, in competition for a Fellowship at Oriel; then to have become college tutor—embued the rising generation for six years with classical literature and philosophy —married a wife verging on her tabbyhood, and retired, without any reasonable prospect of a family, to read Jeremy Taylor in a snug living of ₤1000 a-year.

   • 2013 spring, Bobbie Ann Mason, “The Horsehair Ball Gown”, in The Virginia Quarterly Review, volume 89, number 2, page 93:

     Isabella herself, being unmarried, had led a life of tabbyhood—one of their mother's quainter terms.

   • 2019, Charlotte Biggs, A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, page 105:

     I know if I venture to add a word in defence of Tabbyhood, I shall be engaged in a war with yourself and all our young acquaintance; yet in this age, which so liberally “softens, and blends, and weakens, and dilutes” away all distinctions, I own I am not without some partiality for strong lines of demarcation, and, perhaps, when fifty retrogrades into fifteen, it makes a worse confusion in society than the toe of the peasant treading on the heel of the courtier.