I believe that calico cats are more commonly called that in North America than in Britain. By the 1890s, those so-common cats with their patches of orange, white, and black, which were obviously just crying out for a descriptive name, also became "calico". In the early 1800s, Americans started to apply the name "calico" to other multicoloured things, especially piebald horses. In England, "calico" applied to any cotton, plain or printed, but in the US, the word came to apply specifically to multicoloured printed cottons, which were a specialty of India. ‘an Indian stuff made of cotton, sometimes stained with gay and beautiful colours’ was known as "Calicut cloth" or, in something more closely approximating the original language, "calico cloth", often shortened to "calico". One of the items that India exported to England through this port was cotton fabric, so that by the time Samuel Johnson wrote his dictionary in the mid-1700s, what he described as In English, the city was called "Calicut". The city now known as Kozhikode on the southwest coast of India was called in Malayalam Kōlịkōdụ, and in the 16th century it was the second busiest port for trade between Europe and India. Is the kitten above dreaming of exotic India? That is where the word "calico" comes from. In the last two "cat words" posts, we looked at names for orange tabby cats, and now we are going to mix in some black and white, and look at calico cats.
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