Why do they call it caddy corner

We know this thanks to a certain W. The word is also used relatively infrequently. People tend to be far more tolerant of variable spellings and probably pronunciations for words that appear infrequently than for words that are encountered more often.

For instance, in tasks where participants must decide whether or not strings of letters make real English words, psychologists have found that people are less likely to reject misspellings of low frequency words than misspellings of high-frequency words. Really, how could it be otherwise? The usage experts are adamant—of course they are! In my dialect, incidentally, caddy-corner is used like next: You can be caddy-corner to someone, but not caddy-corner from or directly caddy-corner someone.

Someone who is sitting one seat up and one seat over from someone else in the room is also kitty-corner. What does catty-corner mean? Catty-corner is a variant of the same phrase. It means the same thing and can be used in all of the same contexts. This phrase itself originated in Middle English as catre corner , where it was related to a Latin term for four-cornered.

The variant cater-corner is still in use today, though without the frequency of the other two forms. This graph compares catty-corner vs. People often thought that the word actually had something to do with cats, so cat derivatives started cropping up.

Whether you say kitty-corner, catty-corner, or something else largely depends on your region. Other respondents used cater-corner, diagonal, or something else, and were scattered throughout the states. Afterwards, it became an adjective. For instance, the catnap. It is a reference to, well, cats napping.