Cheshire Cat
Book 1865 · Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
Disembodied grin attached to an unreliable cat, equally comfortable on a tree branch or vanishing in mid-conversation.
Lewis Carroll introduced the Cheshire Cat in chapter six of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in the kitchen of the Duchess. The cat's defining trait — the smile remaining after the rest of the body has faded away — has become the most quoted Carroll image after Alice herself, predating cinematic special effects by half a century. The phrase "to grin like a Cheshire cat" predates Carroll: it appears in print as early as the 1788 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Carroll likely encountered it in childhood — he was born in Cheshire — and grafted it onto the surreal logic of Wonderland, where its literalisation became iconic.
0 words. Sources: see /methodology.
Tags
fictional
lewis-carroll
alice
talking-cat
surreal
Names like Cheshire Cat
Browse cat names matching Cheshire Cat and discover meaning, origin, and related names → see the Cheshire Cat name page.
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