"the cat's pyjamas" meaning in All languages combined

See the cat's pyjamas on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

Audio: en-au-cat's pyjamas.ogg [Australia]
Etymology: Popular in the US as early as 1922 around which the bee's knees, cat's whiskers, and numerous other similar phrases gained prominence. Sometimes attributed to cartoonist Tad Dorgan. It is widely believed that the origin of this idiom predates considerably, tracing back to the early 1800s in England. During this period, a tailor named E.B. Katz crafted silk pajamas for members of royalty and the upper class. Etymology templates: {{m|en|the bee's knees}} the bee's knees, {{m|en|cat's whiskers}} cat's whiskers Head templates: {{en-noun|p|def=1|head=cat's pyjamas}} the cat's pyjamas pl (plural only)
  1. (idiomatic) A highly sought-after and fancy example of something, usually referring to inanimate objects. Wikipedia link: Tad Dorgan Tags: idiomatic, plural, plural-only Categories (lifeform): Cats Synonyms: the bee's knees, cat's meow, dog's bollocks, all that and a bag of chips, spider's ankles [Ireland], ant's pants [Australia], the cat's pajamas [US]

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for the cat's pyjamas meaning in All languages combined (3.1kB)

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      "args": {
        "1": "en",
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  "etymology_text": "Popular in the US as early as 1922 around which the bee's knees, cat's whiskers, and numerous other similar phrases gained prominence. Sometimes attributed to cartoonist Tad Dorgan. It is widely believed that the origin of this idiom predates considerably, tracing back to the early 1800s in England. During this period, a tailor named E.B. Katz crafted silk pajamas for members of royalty and the upper class.",
  "head_templates": [
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  "lang_code": "en",
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          "text": "That new car was really the cat's pyjamas."
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      "word": "the bee's knees"
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    {
      "word": "cat's meow"
    },
    {
      "word": "dog's bollocks"
    },
    {
      "word": "all that and a bag of chips"
    },
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      ],
      "word": "the cat's pajamas"
    }
  ],
  "word": "the cat's pyjamas"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-20 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (1d5a7d1 and 304864d). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.