- 1虎斑貓（身上有條紋或漩渦花紋的貓；注意這是花色不是品種，米克斯也很多是虎斑）
A tabby is a cat whose fur carries a pattern of darker stripes, swirls or spots over a lighter background — most often the classic brown-grey cat with dark bars down its sides and rings round its tail, and nearly always an M shape on the forehead. The important thing, and the thing rarely guess, is that tabby is not a breed. It is a coat pattern, and cats of many different breeds, plus most ordinary street cats, can be tabbies. So 'What breed is she?' 'She's a tabby' is a slightly loose answer that everyone accepts anyway. The word works as a noun ('we've got two tabbies') and as an adjective before a noun ('a tabby cat', 'a tabby kitten'). It is an everyday word, not a technical one, though cat breeders do use it precisely and even name the sub-patterns — mackerel tabby for straight stripes, classic tabby for wide swirls, spotted tabby for spots. In older English 'tabby' sometimes meant specifically a female cat, and older still it was the name of a kind of striped silk cloth; you may meet those meanings in old books, but nobody uses them now. There is also a dated and use of 'old tabby' for a gossiping older woman — worth recognising, best not repeated.
組成Does not split into pieces. It came into English in the mid 1600s from French 'tabis', a striped or wavy silk, which came in turn from Arabic — ultimately from al-ʕattābiyya, a quarter of Baghdad known for making that silk and named after a prince called ʕattāb. So the cat is named after a cloth, and the cloth after a neighbourhood: people saw the same wavy pattern in the fur.
同家族的字
- taffetaanother silk-cloth name that reached English from the same part of the world, though from Persian 'tâfta' (woven cloth) rather than from the Baghdad quarter
原始詞典資料10 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
Tabbyname
- 1
A diminutive of the female given name Tabitha.
- 2
A diminutive of the female given name Tabetha.
tabbynoun/ˈtæb.i/
- 1
A kind of waved silk, usually called watered silk, manufactured like taffeta, but thicker and stronger. The watering is given to it by calendering.
- "Ay, ay; she wore a flowered silk tabby sacque, on band days," said Toole, who had an eye and a corner in his memory for female costume, "a fine showy—I remember."
- 2
A concrete mixture of lime with shells, gravel, or stones, in equal proportions, with an equal proportion of water. When dry, this becomes as hard as rock.
- 3
A brindled cat.
- A wise tabby, a blinking sphinx, watched from her warm sill. Pity to disturb them. Mohammed cut a piece out of his mantle not to wake her.
- 4
slangA woman, irrespective of age, but often used for a young, attractive woman.
- ‘The kids go for a drive in a borrowed car, park on another street between the corner lamps, and then there’s ructions because some little tabby gets up the stick.’
- 5
archaicAn old maid or gossip.
tabbyadj/ˈtæb.i/
- 1
Having a wavy or watered appearance.
- a tabby waistcoat
- 2
Brindled; diversified in color.
- a tabby cat
tabbyverb/ˈtæb.i/
- 1
To give a wavy or watered appearance to (a textile).
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。