Kit-Cat Club

or Kit-Kat Club

[ kit-kat ]

noun

1. a club of Whig wits, painters, politicians, and men of letters, including Robert Walpole, John Vanbrugh, William Congreve, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Godfrey Kneller, that flourished in London between 1703 and 1720.

Word History and Origins

Origin of Kit-Cat Club¹

From Kit (as short for Christopher) Cat(ling) , alleged to be the keeper of a pie-house where the club met (with play on kit-cat, variant of tipcat; kit ³, cat ( def ) )

Example Sentences

And yet he need not have been so nervous about anyone tracking him to his den; for Lower Series-place was once the resort of many of the choice spirits of a bygone age: lordly gallants strutted there in the showy costumes of their day; here, too, was the famous Kit-cat Club; but the glory had departed when Matt chose the court for his resting-place: where the wits made their rendezvous, were misery and dirt, frouzy rotting tenements, vice and disease.

From Project Gutenberg

At the Whigs' Kit-Cat Club, Addison and Congreve fellowshipped with statesmen and lords; at the Tories' Scriblerus, Swift and his friends forgathered.

From Time Magazine Archive

As a member of the fashionably rowdy London Kit-Cat Club I assumedly viewed with alarm the publicity which it received last week, due to the shocking behavior of a Lord.

From Time Magazine Archive

I named the Kit-Cat Club, as accustomed to assemble here; but the oddity of the name excited their ridicule; and I was told that no such Club was held there; but, perhaps, said one to the other, the gentleman means the Club that assembles at the public-house on the Common.

From Project Gutenberg

I requested then to be shewn to this room; when I was conducted across a detached garden, and brought to a handsome structure in the architectural style of the early part of the last century—evidently the establishment of the Kit-Cat Club!

From Project Gutenberg