Something described as the cat’s pajamas is excellent, the best of its kind. The phrase is American slang from about 1920, one of a flapper-era family of nonsense animal expressions that also gave the cat’s whiskers and the cat’s meow. British English usually writes it ‘the cat’s pyjamas’.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘The cat’s pajamas’?
Before we start let’s get the spelling of pajamas out of the way. The most commonly used spelling worldwide is ‘pajamas’. In the UK we prefer ‘pyjamas’. There’s no right or wrong about this - the word derives from the Persian and Urdu word pay-jama, so you might say pajamas and pyjamas have an equal claim to authenticity. I’ve opted here for the spelling normally used in the USA as that is where ‘the cat’s pajamas’ was coined.
In the 1920s the urban east-coast cities of the USA were a breeding ground for new and wacky modes of expression. The bright young things of the flapper era wanted to throw off anything old or stuffy in fashion, music and language. Many new, and for the most part nonsense, animal related expressions were coined to denote excellence. These included the snake’s hips, the kipper’s knickers, the monkey’s eyebrows and so on. Of the many such phrases only the bee’s knees and the cat’s pajamas remain in regular use.
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‘The cat’s pajamas’ is a nonsense phrase but there is some sense behind it.
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There is a related ‘cat’ expression - ‘the cat’s whiskers’. This has been used as a term of excellence, both in the 1920s and up until today, but differs from the other flapper era expressions in that, as well as a literal reference to the whiskers of a cat, it was the name of the thin tuning wires on early crystal radio sets. As an existing term it got swept up and included in the many terms for excellence.
The cat’s pajamas is a little different from the other similar ‘animal’ expressions as it was in prior use outside of 1920s New York circles. The earliest example of it that I can find in print is from the South Carolina newspaper The Pageland Journal, February 1918:
Wouldn’t that beat the cat’s pajamas?
Wordorigins.org, which works from digitised American newspaper archives, gives its own earliest find as 17 July 1919, in the unit newspaper of the US Army’s 21st General Hospital in Denver, Colorado. The phrase was used there of an offer of free food at the unit’s weekly baseball games:
it would be the cat’s pajamas to have feed like that dished up to the fellows every Thursday.
That is a year later than the Pageland Journal example, and like it, it comes from far outside New York.
The coinage is often laid at the door of the American sports cartoonist Thomas Aloysius ‘Tad’ Dorgan, and the two standard accounts of the phrase disagree about him. Green’s Dictionary of Slang states the attribution as fact, describing the whole family of terms as coined, like many other similar terms, by the US sportwriter T.A. ‘Tad’ Dorgan. Wordorigins.org rejects it: Dorgan did use the cat’s meow, but on that reading he was not the originator. The 1918 and 1919 examples above, neither of them his, are the difficulty, and the question is genuinely open.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang gives its first dated citation for the excellence sense as the Connecticut newspaper the Bridgeport Telegram, 14 September 1921:
Speaking about drummers, wasn’t Howard Goulden the cat’s pajamas at the Sousa concert.
Etymonline puts the height of the craze two years later still. It calls the bee’s knees a survivor of a fad around 1923 for slang terms of excellence based on animal anatomy, and names the cat’s whiskers, the cat’s pajamas and the cat’s meow as the versions that lasted through the century. The formula was still working at the end of that century: Etymonline dates the British dog’s bollocks to 1989.
‘The cat’s pajamas’ differs from the rest of them in another way too: the animal reference is not purely fanciful. ‘Cat’ was flapper slang for fashionable young woman. This was later taken up by jazz circles and morphed into a name for one of either sex who exhibited style, as cool cat and hepcat.
By the mid 1920s the US phrases the cat’s eyebrows/pajamas had become well enough established to have travelled to the UK, as seen in this extract from the London newspaper The Daily Herald, May 1923:
“Oh, you lovers of Rudolph [Valentino] - He is the cat’s eyebrows.”
If you have studied the American language you will know that this is the highest of all praise, except perhaps “he is the cat’s pyjamas.”
P. G. Wodehouse picked the family up in the same year, giving the sister phrase to Miss Peavey, the American poetess of Leave It to Psmith, 1923:
Well, if this ain’t the cat’s whiskers!
The Cat’s Pajamas was so fashionable a term as to be taken up as the name of many things in the 1920s - a dance, a stage show, a song, a film, even the name of a style of furry underwear.
See other phrases that were coined in the USA.