Grimalkin
Grih-MAWL-kin
A domestic cat; especially an old
female cat
In the opening scene of William
Shakespeare's Macbeth, one of the three witches planning to meet with Macbeth
suddenly announces, "I come, Graymalkin." The witch is responding to
the summons of her familiar, or guardian spirit, which is embodied in the form
of a cat. Shakespeare's graymalkin literally means "gray cat." The
gray is of course the color; the malkin was a nickname for Matilda or Maud that
came to be used in dialect as a general name for a cat—and sometimes a hare—and
for an untidy woman as well. By the 1630s, graymalkin had been altered to the
modern spelling grimalkin.