Meaning
There are several different methods of reaching the same goal, so if one approach fails or is blocked, workable alternatives remain. It is nearly always delivered as a full proverb, in a reassuring or wily spirit rather than a literal one. Informal proverb; the violent image is idiomatic and not meant literally. Regional use: General English (earliest records American).
Origin
The skinning version is American and, so far as documented research shows, first appears in print on 15 January 1836 in the New York Transcript, reprinted in an Indiana paper; Seba Smith's Way Down East (c. 1854) treats it as an established proverb, and Mark Twain used it in A Connecticut Yankee (1889). It did not appear from nowhere: English had older proverbs of the same shape, such as 'more ways to kill a dog than hanging' (1640), 'more than one way to kill a cat' (1833) and 'more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream' (1855), and Grammarphobia argues the current form probably conflated these with miser sayings like 'would skin a cat' (1859). No origin is certain. The catfish theory, that cat is short for catfish which had to be skinned before cooking, is dismissed by World Wide Words as just a local application of the proverb, and the phrase is unrelated to the gymnastic exercise skin the cat.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- many ways to skin a cat
- more ways than one to skin a cat
- other ways to skin a cat
- there's more than one way to skin a cat
Usage Examples
- If the bank will not lend to us, there is more than one way to skin a cat.
- As her grandmother used to say, there is more than one way to skin a cat, so she opened a stall online instead.
- There is more than one way to skin a cat, and our team has tried three of them this quarter.