Tabby cat

A tabby cat, or simply tabby, is any domestic cat (Felis catus) with a distinctive M-shaped marking on its forehead, stripes by its eyes and across its cheeks, along its back, around its legs and tail, and characteristic striped, dotted, lined, flecked, banded, or swirled patterns on the body: neck, shoulders, sides, flanks, chest.

This can be further traced to the Middle French atabis (14th century), which stemmed from the Arabic term عتابية / ʿattābiyya.

[4] This word is a reference to the Attabiya district of Baghdad, noted for its striped cloth and silk;[5] itself named after the Umayyad governor of Mecca Attab ibn Asid.

Such silk cloth became popular in the Muslim world and spread to England, where the word "tabby" became commonly used in the 17th and 18th centuries.

[1] The classic tabby, also known as blotched tabby, has the 'M' pattern on the forehead but, rather than primarily thin stripes or spots, the body markings are thick curving bands in whorls or a swirled pattern, with a distinctive mark on each side of the body resembling a bullseye.

Residual ghost striping and/or barring can often be seen on the lower legs, face, and belly and sometimes at the tail tip, as well as the standard 'M' and a long dark line running along the spine, primarily in ticked tabbies that also carry a mackerel or classic tabby allele.

The orange areas can be darker or lighter spots or stripes, but the white is nearly always solid and usually appears on the underbelly, paws, chest, and muzzle.

[14] Male cats with the gene for orange can be either X°Y ginger or X-Y black or non-ginger tabby.

The fifth pattern is emergent, being expressed by female cats with one black and one orange gene on each of their two X chromosomes, and is explained by Barr bodies and the genetics of sex-linked inheritance.

The dominant A expresses the underlying tabby pattern, while the recessive non-agouti or "hyper-melanistic" allele, a, does not.

However, the agouti gene primarily controls the production of black pigment, so a cat with an O allele for orange color will still express the tabby pattern.

So a cat with a TmTm or TmTb genotype sets the basic pattern of thin stripes (mackerel tabby) that underlies the coat, while a TbTb cat will express a classic tabby coat pattern with thick bands and a ring or concentric stripes on its sides.

[16] A 2015 study from University of California, Davis sought to examine the relationship between coat color and behavior in cats.

[17] Researchers ran statistical analyses from 1,274 online surveys completed by cat owners.

Sometime after the mid-17th century, he noted that William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury was "a great lover of Cats" and "was presented with some Cyprus-cats, i.e. our Tabby-Cats".

He then claimed that "I doe well remember that the common English Catt, was white with some blueish piednesse [i.e. with grey parts].