caterwaul

Words just like the ones you used –they mean nothing at all to you, but they caterwaul…
caterwaul… caterwaul… through my lonely hall.
I really like this word. I’ve wanted to post an entry on it ever since Amy’s Caterpillar entry reminded me of caterwaul’s curious and bewitching sonority.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the definition of our use of the word’s verb form is:

To utter a similar cry [to cats in heat]; to make a discordant, hideous noise; to quarrel like cats.¹

Today we use the word primarily as a synonym for howl, but in the 17th and 18th centuries, the sexual connotations of comparing a person to a mating cat were also utilized, as this in this example from the OED article:

“She catter~wauls, and must have a stallion..she must and will marry again.”²

--even that questionable mental image couldn’t diminish my affinity for the word’s odd semi-onomatopoeia.

I say “semi-” because the -waul portion of the word is actually onomatopoetic; from Middle English wawlen or wrawlen, meaning “howl.”³ The root of wawlen is Old English wāwan, which refers to the sound of the blowing of the wind.⁴

And as Amy’s entry explains, “cater-” comes simply from the supposed Middle English root cater derived from Low German kater, meaning “tomcat.” It is also possible, however, that the word cater never existed in Middle English, and the -er- infix is just an arbitrary conjoining syllable.⁵

Whatever the case, I still think it’s a beautiful word.

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¹“caterwaul”. Oxford English Dictionary. 2007. Oxford University Press. 29 March 2009. http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50034602.
² Burton, Robert. The anatomy of melancholy. 1621.
³“caterwaul”. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 4th Ed. Houghton Mifflin. 2000.
⁴”Caterwaul”. Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. 2nd Ed. Random House Inc. 2006.
⁵Liberman, Anatoly and Mitchell, J. Lawrence. An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology. Pg. 183. University of Minnesota Press. 2008.
*Photograph by Graeme Mitchell. "Dark Hall". http://www.dammasch.com/photo/graeme/large/dark_hall_large.jpg