not enough room to swing a cat
not enough room to swing a cat noun: very little space (available) (of a very small room).
Noun
not enough room to swing a cat (uncountable)
- Very little space (available) (of a very small room).
- They had not space enough (according to the vulgar saying) to swing a Cat in.1665, Richard Kephale Medela Pestilentiae
- My own apartment, to take a case in point, was a sort of hermit's cell in which one would have been hard put to it to swing a cat, even a smaller one than Augustus, not of course that one often wants to do much cat-swinging.1960, P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves in the Offing, chapter VIII
Origin of not enough room to swing a cat
Attested 1665, by which point already in common use; perhaps of naval slang origin. While it is frequently stated that the phrase is derived from cat-o’-nine-tails (“type of whip”), this latter term is only attested from 1695, and hence this idiom presumably derived from literally swinging a cat around, as by the tail.
Questions about not enough room to swing a cat
- What does not enough room to swing a cat mean?
- Not enough room to swing a cat means very little space (available) (of a very small room).
- What part of speech is not enough room to swing a cat?
- Not enough room to swing a cat is a noun.
Words near not enough room to swing a cat in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: not enough room to swing a cat (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “not enough room to swing a cat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/not_enough_room_to_swing_a_cat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.