Words with Webster: Panther

We have two fun Friday features for you today. First up is Real Cat Webster, who has another wild word to share. After that, it’s on to Friendly Fill-Ins!

Words with Webster

Hi, everybody! It’s me, Real Cat Webster. Welcome to Words with Me. Today’s word is “panther.” I picked this word because one of the comments to my last post asked, “If leopards aren’t panthers, then what are?” That’s a great question, and we wondered about that ourselves. So of course I looked it up, and Webster’s dictionary says “panther” means

(1): a leopard of a supposed exceptionally large fierce variety (2): a leopard of the black color phase. (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, unabridged, online)

A panther can also be a cougar or a jaguar, again according to Webster’s.

Next I used Mommy’s library account to look at the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines “panther” like this:

Originally: an exotic spotted big cat that was believed to be distinct from the leopard. Now: a leopard (Panthera pardus), esp. a melanistic one.

The OED also says that “panther” can mean a cougar or jaguar, although it indicates the “jaguar” meaning is obsolete, which seems weird to Mommy because she has seen “panther” used to refer to a melanistic jaguar a whole bunch of times.

I found this fun quote from 1894 to make things more confusing:

The panther was long called a “tyger” in the Carolinas, and a “lyon” elsewhere. (Century magazine, April, 849)

This quote uses "panther" to refer to the cougar, puma, mountain lion, or whatever other synonym you can think of.

Anyway, “panther” has been around since the early 13^th century, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. It came from the Old French word pantere, which was from the Latin panthera, which was from the Greek panther (“panther, leopard”). Some of you may recognize panthera as the genus name of several big cat species: the lion, tiger, jaguar, leopard, and snow leopard.

This cat could be called a panther (it's a melanistic leopard), but so could a few other cats.
Photo by Davidvraju [CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons.

There are lots of quotes for this word, so I picked just a couple:

The leoparde or spotted panthere…signifieth the kingdom of great Alexander. (George Joye, 1545, The Exposition of Daniel the Prophete, 1^st ed., vii. f. 98)

In the twelfth edition of the Systema Naturæ the Panther and Leopard seem to be confounded by Linnæus himself, who seems to have considered them as the same species. (George Shaw and James Francis Stephens, 1800, General Zoology, 1^st ed., I. ii. 349)

In conclusion, a panther is a leopard … except when it is something else.

You humans just can’t decide what to call cats, can you?

Friendly Fill-Ins

And now it’s time for Friendly Fill-Ins, from 15 and Meowing and The Four-Legged Furballs. Old SoLT did the first two this week, and Real Cat Paisley did the next two.

Old SoLT’s answers:

1. As a child, I feared ghosts, and I thought everyplace we lived was haunted.

2. Friday the 13th is a movie I remember watching on cable when I was in high school. It scared me then and still kind of freaks me out today. I don’t have any superstitions about the actual day.

 Real Cat Paisley’s answers:

3. I think tortitude is my best quality.

4. You can’t go wrong with taking a nap. Napping solves most problems and gives you more energy to play.