An ocelot is a wild cat from the Americas, from the south of the United States down through Central America and well into South America. Dictionaries sometimes call it a “large” cat, but though actually it is more a medium one: much bigger than a house cat, with a long body and a coat of spots and stripes, yet far smaller than a jaguar or a leopard. It often hunts at night in forests, and it is shy. People prize the coat, which has not been kind to the animal’s history. The name came into English from French. A French scientist, Buffon, took a Nahuatl word — ōcēlōtl, from the old language of the Aztec people in Mexico — which in that language meant the jaguar, and he used it for this smaller spotted cat. So the name has a little twist: it started as a word for a different, bigger cat.