عتابي

In medieval Baghdad, the Attabiya quarter—named after Prince Attab of the Umayyad dynasty—was famous for producing a distinctive striped silk fabric. The cloth was called ʿattābī after the neighborhood, and it was prized across the Islamic world for its shimmering, watered-silk pattern of alternating light and dark stripes.

European traders in the Mediterranean encountered this fabric and borrowed the name. In Old French it became atabis, then tabis. English adopted it as tabby, initially referring only to the silk—a 'tabby waistcoat' was a striped silk garment. Samuel Pepys mentions buying tabby fabric in his famous diary.

Then came the cats. People noticed that certain domestic cats had coat patterns that resembled the striped Baghdad silk—alternating bands of light and dark fur with a distinctive moiré quality. By the 1690s, a tabby cat was any cat with this striped pattern. The fabric meaning faded; the feline meaning took over completely.

This is one of etymology's most delightful journeys: a prince's name became a neighborhood, a neighborhood became a fabric, a fabric became a coat pattern, and a coat pattern became the default image conjured by the word 'cat' for millions of English speakers.