Grey Cat Names, Distinctive Names for Grey Kittens, Page 2

The British literary cat is, more often than not, a grey one. Sir John Tenniel drew the Cheshire Cat as a striped grey tabby in the 1865 Alice illustrations — Disney's 1951 pink-and-purple recoloring is a 20th-century revision. Terry Pratchett's witches share their cottages with Greebo, the most-cited grey tom in modern fantasy. Compton Mackenzie, Doris Lessing, and Beverley Nichols all built mid-century cat memoirs around grey housecats. If you've ended up with a grey kitten, you've inherited a long naming tradition.

Underneath the literature is a single recessive gene. Every solid-grey cat carries two copies of the dilute allele (d/d at the MLPH locus), which thins black pigment to slate. The same dilution turns chocolate into lilac and red into cream — but on a black base it produces the smoke-and-pewter shades that cat fanciers have been calling "blue" since well before color photography. Naval grey, the Royal Navy's BS381C No.640 ship paint, is essentially the same hue.

Grey housecats in the UK trace heavily to the British Shorthair "British Blue," reconstituted after WWII; pedigrees draw from Russian Blue and Chartreux, the other two classical blue breeds.

The "blue cat" naming canon was built by three pedigree breeds — Russian Blue, Chartreux, and British Shorthair — long before grey moggies inherited it. The pedigree collections carry that lineage; the broader grey-cat tradition drinks from them downstream.