grimalkin

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The Word of the Day for March 5 is:

grimalkin   \grih-MAWL-kin\   noun
     : a domestic cat; especially : an old female cat

Example sentence:
     The family grimalkin, dreaming, perhaps, of mousing days 
long past, twitched her tail as she dozed contentedly on the 
windowsill.

Did you know?
     In the opening scene of "Macbeth," one of the three witches 
planning to meet with Macbeth suddenly announces, "I come, 
Graymalkin." The witch is responding to the summons of her 
familiar, or guardian spirit, which is embodied in the form of a 
cat. Shakespeare's "graymalkin" literally means "gray cat." 
The "gray" is of course the color; the "malkin" was a nickname 
for Matilda or Maud that came to be used in dialect as a general 
name for a cat (and sometimes a hare), and for an untidy woman 
as well. By the 1630s, "graymalkin" had been altered to the 
modern spelling "grimalkin."