Word.ws English Dictionary

tom cat

tom cat is the alternative form of tomcat.

Meaning of tomcat

Noun

tomcat (plural tomcats)

  1. A tom (male cat).
  2. (informal) A promiscuous man.
  3. (Southeast Asia) An insect of the order Coleoptera referring to certain species of rove beetles, particularly in the genus Paederus, known for secreting a potent irritant, pederin, which can cause severe skin irritation and blistering when contacted.

See all 4 meanings of tomcat

Noun capitalized: Tom cat

Tom cat (plural Tom cats)

  1. (archaic) Archaic form of tomcat.
    • There was but one a real maid, / And ſhe ſo very ugly, that / You’d take her for a great Tom cat, / And therefore ſhe could never hire / A man that would attempt to try her.1772, [Thomas Bridges], “Homer’s Iliad. Book VI.”, in A Burlesque Translation of Homer, London: […] S[amuel] Hooper, […], →OCLC, page 252
    • “How you talk!” / “Talk, miss! It’s enough to make a Tom cat talk French grammar, only to see how she tosses her head,” replied the handmaid.1838 March – 1839 October, Charles Dickens, “Whereby the Reader will be enabled to trace the further course of Miss Fanny Squeers’s Love, and to ascertain whether it ran smoothly or otherwise”, in...

Forms of tom cat

pluraltom cats
pluralTom cats

Questions about tom cat

What is tom cat the alternative form of?
Tom cat is the alternative form of tomcat.
What part of speech is tom cat?
Tom cat is a noun.
What is the plural of tom cat?
The plural of tom cat is tom cats.

Words near tom cat in the dictionary

  1. Tom and Jerryism
  2. Tom Bawcock's Eve
  3. Tom Bombadil
  4. tom boy
  5. tom boys
  6. tom cat
  7. tom cats
  8. tom cod
  9. Tom Collins
  10. Tom Collinses
  11. Tom Fool's knot

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tom cat (page history and authors); Tom cat (page history and authors); tomcat (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: “tom cat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tom_cat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.