Meaning
Said of a place far too cramped for comfort, with barely space to move about - a ship's berth, a bedsit, a packed office. A humorous hyperbole about confined quarters; no actual cat is imagined by anyone using it today. Informal and jocular; a standard exaggerated complaint about cramped space. Regional use: British English in origin; now General English.
Origin
First recorded in Richard Kephale's plague treatise Medela Pestilentiae (London, 1665), which describes a poor family's room that 'had not space enough (according to the vulgar saying) to swing a Cat in' - the aside showing the expression was already proverbial. Which cat is meant is unresolved. The often-repeated claim that it was the cat o' nine tails, the naval flogging whip, is rejected by both the Phrase Finder and the wordhistories blog on chronological grounds: cat-o'-nine-tails is not recorded until William Congreve's Love for Love (1695), three decades after Kephale, and floggings were administered on deck before the assembled crew, not in cramped spaces. Wordhistories suggests the likelier source is a literal cat, swung by the tail in cruel diversions of the period, pointing to cat-baiting pastimes recorded from Jonson's era to Francis Grose's 1785 dictionary.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- hardly room to swing a cat
- not enough room to swing a cat
- room to swing a cat
Usage Examples
- The holiday cottage was charming, but there wasn't room to swing a cat.
- They pay a fortune for a city flat with barely enough room to swing a cat.
- With three desks, a filing cabinet and a photocopier, the back office has no room to swing a cat.