indessed roscivs

Today, on one of the mailing lists I’m on, someone mentioned a building that was “kiddy-corner” to another building. I’ve often heard the phrase “kitty-corner” to refer to diagonal adjacency, but I wasn’t sure as to the origins of the word, nor whether “kiddy-corner” was an acceptable variant. After some googling, I found this list of variants:

catty-corner, catercorner, catacorner, catta-, catter-, catti-; rarely caddy-, cally-, caper-, catacorners, cat-cornered, catercorn, catty-corned, catty-cornereds, catty-corner, caty-corner, katter-kornered.

That’s an awful lot of entries, but no “kiddy corner”. World Wide Words has more on the etymology of the word:

The first part comes from the French word quatre, four. It’s actually quite an old expression that first appeared in English as the name for the four in dice, soon Anglicised to cater.

Eventually it lost all connection with its original meaning, and people thought it had something to do with cats, so “catercorner” became “cattycorner” became “kittycorner”. And now, apparently, has further eggcorned into “kiddycorner”, at least for some people.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.