Word.ws English Dictionary

Katz

/kæts/

Katz proper noun: a surname; variant form Kats.

Proper noun

Katz

  1. A surname; variant form Kats.
    • IF VOLFER is happy, Transportation Minister Israel Katz seems almost jubilant.2016 September 1, Carl Hoffman, “The project that could help determine Israel's future”, in The Jerusalem Post, archived from the original on 04 Feb 2022
    • In 2017, Katz estimated that around 5,000 people per year were acquiring citizenship abroad through CIPs.2019 October 7, Kate Springer, “Passports for purchase: Open citizenship doors around the world”, in CNN

Origin of Katz

As a Jewish name generally explained as Hebrew כ״ץ (Katz), abbreviation of כֹּהֵן צֶדֶק (kohén tzédeq, literally “righteous priest”). However, the name also exists among non-Jewish Germans, where it is derived from German Katze (“cat”, cf. English Catt), from various placenames (Katzenelnbogen, Katzenberg, Katzenstein), or even from a byform of Ketzer (“heretic”). As evidenced by the Dictionary of American family names, several of these names are also found among Jews. Therefore it remains an open question to what extent the interpretation as “righteous priest” is secondary, given that it was a general practice among Ashkenazi Jews to derive or reinterpret names by phono-semantic matching (a prime example being Cohn, principally a German name from Conrad, but popularized among Jews due to the phonetic similarity with the word for “priest” mentioned above).

Words formed from Katz

Words that rhyme with Katz

5 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about Katz

What does Katz mean?
Katz means a surname; variant form Kats.
What part of speech is Katz?
Katz is a proper noun.
How do you pronounce Katz?
Katz is pronounced /kæts/.

Words near Katz in the dictionary

  1. katydids
  2. Katys
  3. katyusha
  4. katyushas
  5. katywampus
  6. Katz
  7. Katz syndrome
  8. katzbalger
  9. katzbalgers
  10. Katzenberg
  11. katzenjammer

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Katz (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Katz.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/katz. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.