shoot the cat
Shoot the cat is a wonderfully vivid piece of obsolete British slang meaning to vomit — particularly after excessive drinking.
Definitions
Shoot the cat is a wonderfully vivid piece of obsolete British slang meaning to vomit — particularly after excessive drinking. The expression has the dark, irreverent humour typical of old British pub and naval vernacular, where bodily functions were described in theatrical, often animal-related terms. While the phrase itself has fallen out of everyday use, it survives as a piece of historical slang and turns up in discussions of English language history and 18th–19th century colloquialisms.
He'd drunk three flagons of porter by midnight and had to step outside to shoot the cat.
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(UK, slang, obsolete) To vomit.
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🇬🇧About British & Irish slang slang
UK and Irish slang — Cockney, Scouse, Geordie, Yorkshire, Glaswegian, Brummie, Welsh, West Country, plus Irish English. Centuries of regional dialects feeding into modern British and Irish street talk.
See all British & Irish slang slang on Slangora.
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Semantically related
- catshit65%
(vulgar, slang) The feces from a cat (feline feces).
- cat's water62%
Cat's water is a wonderfully backhanded piece of obsolete British slang for gin — specifically cheap, rough gin. The implication is obvious: this stuff is barely fit for a cat, let alone a person. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, gin was the drink of the urban poor, sold in dodgy establishments and associated with social ruin. Calling it cat's water was the slang world's commentary on its quality. The term is gloriously extinct but paints a vivid picture of the gin-soaked streets of Georgian London.
- shoot62%
Mild expletive substituting for a stronger word. "Aw, shoot." Quintessentially Southern.
- duck shoot62%
A duck shoot is slang for something ridiculously easy — a total cinch, a piece of cake. The metaphor comes from carnival-style shooting galleries where you shoot at slow-moving mechanical ducks and can barely miss. When someone calls a task a duck shoot, they mean it requires zero effort or skill. It has the same flavor as 'shooting fish in a barrel' but sounds a bit more casual and British. Use it to describe a game, a test, a competition, or any situation where victory was basically guaranteed from the start.