Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. Informal To go away hastily; leave at once.
- n. Jazz singing in which improvised, meaningless syllables are sung to a melody.
- v. To sing scat.
- n. Excrement, especially of an animal; dung.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A tax; tribute; specifically, a land-tax paid in the Shetland Islands.
- n. A brisk shower of rain, driven by the wind.
- n. Damage; loss.
- Be off; begone: addressed to cats and other small animals.
- To scare or drive away (a cat or other small animal) by crying “Scat!”
- n. See skat.
Wiktionary
- n. A tax; tribute.
- n. A land-tax paid in the Shetland Islands.
- n. biology Animal excrement; dung.
- n. slang Heroin.
- n. slang, obsolete Whiskey.
- n. slang Coprophilia.
- n. UK, dialect A shower of rain.
- n. music, jazz Scat singing.
- v. music, jazz To sing an improvised melodic solo using nonsense syllables, often onomatopoeic or imitative of musical instruments.
- v. colloquial To leave quickly (often used in the imperative).
- v. colloquial An imperative demand, often understood by speaker and listener as impertinent.
GNU Webster's 1913
- interj. Go away; begone; away; -- chiefly used in driving off a cat.
- n. rare Tribute.
- n. Prov. Eng. A shower of rain.
WordNet 3.0
- v. flee; take to one's heels; cut and run
- n. singing jazz; the singer substitutes nonsense syllables for the words of the song and tries to sound like a musical instrument
Etymologies
- From the expression quicker than s'cat ("in a great hurry") (Wiktionary)
- Origin unknown. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“I've never heard anyone say, in New Orleans, even the word 'scat'.”
Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph
“Dinkins would have no second term, as Giuliani sniped, bitched, needled, and flung scat from the sidelines during Dinkins 'entire term — with help from his new breed patrons on the media side, and swept into power on a pounding fist and a constant, yapping bark.”
“I check out the brochure, but there is no course in scat singing.”
“A researcher with the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA is testing animal scat from the 1950s and 1960s to determine whether any were left by thylacines.”
“I don't like the word scat anymore, because I learned what it literally means.”
“A troll/crank hides and flings scat from the shadows because he fears exposure.”
“Joshua's mother said, that seemed to mean the same thing as a "scat" -- our Cornish word for a blow -- only the boy didn't seem to see it.”
“Her scat was her signature, but her voice possessed a heavenly perfection that could make a poignant ballad or a silly ditty sound equally sublime.”
“Weirdsmobile: Well, I also feed them Purina One, which cuts the "scat" down, as, and this may just be marketing, the less filler in the pet food, the more compact the scat.”
Use Your Old Coffee Grounds To Clean Dishes, Kill Fleas And Much More | Lifehacker Australia
“Awareness is what enables a hunter, as he stalks an elk or a sheep, not to focus so exclusively on that animal that he is blind to all the signs -- such as scat or tracks, a dip ahead in the terrain where a bear could be concealed, magpies clustered in a tree, the scent of decaying meat -- that could possibly signal a bear's presence.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘scat’.
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Sounds
words that describe sound
atchoo, atishoo, babble, bam, bay, beep, blast, blather, bleat, bleep, blip, bong and 242 more...
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It's a Fish
kelpfish, fatfin, dollarfish, barrelfish, palometa, poppy-fish, ballan-wrasse, sweetlips, bichir, finpike, bergall, cunner and 192 more...
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MUSIC - jazz
Afro, habanera, pentatonic scale, bop, bebop, jazz, cool jazz, pentatonic, malignment, music genre, jazz musician, syncopate and 437 more...
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MUSIC - ALL TERMS
With focus on non-classical styles, but not excluding terms of the latter.
banjo, accompaniment, acoustic bass, bass guitar, bass clef, ground, brass, cornet, Mute, alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, arrangement and 866 more...
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Origin unknown
bamboozle, ballyhoo, banter, bludgeon, chad, cocktail, culvert, curmugeon, dildo, dude, dweeb, dyke and 51 more...
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Public List: Lift Every Voice
Vocal techniques.
word shaping, backphrasing, vibrato, scat, coloratura, rubato, falsetto, death growl, overtone singing, harmonic singing, yodeling, ululation and 17 more...
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Words to Whisper
fare-thee-well, boss of me, dapper, ingenuous, starflower, light out, tauntingly, romeo, parabolic, intuition, adient, delusion and 5 more...
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Git!
Shoo! Scram! Go on now! Nothing to see! Move it!
shoo, scram, get going, move it, move along, go on now, nothing to see, scat, skedaddle, vamoose, beat it, make tracks and 37 more...
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Jazz Era
Swingin' and boppin' slang-a-lang.
mooche, moocher, kick the gong around, applesauce, the berries, hooch, juice joint, the john, rummy, screaming meemies, daddy, cokey and 66 more...
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Surprising four-letter words
I imagine most of these will be Anglo-Saxon, not likely to crop up in the average day's conversation, and thus excellent for Scrabble. ("most" is too common, likewise "will" and even "crop", in an...
blet, quim, clit, buff, sire, wiki, blog, loam, waft, heft, mare, lilt and 68 more...
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Really Cool Four-Letter Words
I marvel at the amazing variety of four-letter words in the English language. And that's not even counting really common (to me) words like fuck.
ibis, pelf, sofa, iota, oboe, lava, icon, sped, puha, pulp, puma, kyat and 150 more...
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Junk
walrus, fascination, broadway, fickle, downturn, bridge, gargle, rotunda, mesh, fab, shortlife, strumming and 304 more...
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Tuesday words
just the next words that come along
nasality, transignification, lapsarian, disciple, slanguage, atwitter, avast, ahoy, asleep, awake, hymnody, glissade and 573 more...
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Words of the Times
Words discovered while reading The New York Times, each with a citation from the paper.
testilying, ghost talk, apneist, solastalgia, izakaya, hooker, telectroscope, airflyte, phomance, bromhidrosis, stinky feet, cupping and 482 more...
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General Loveliness
hirsute, indubitably, gossamer, continuum, murderous, harpy, chimera, foofaraw, hoi polloi, mollycoddle, villein, nonplussed and 121 more...
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It was good enough for Billy Burroughs
smack, dope, junk, mud, h, skag, black tar, horse, brown sugar, chiva, boy, black and 237 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for scat.
hernesheir It's a fish.
These fish, of family Scatophagidae, eat algae and feces.
Jan 2, 2012
john “And this is without the help of creatures like hyenas, which pulverize and eat the bones of all but the largest animals. (That’s why hyena scat is white: it’s the remains of powdered bone.)�?
The New York Times, Reflections on an Oyster, by Olivia Judson, December 30, 2008 Jan 1, 2009
bilby "One of my most memorable calls was also one of the grossest. It was a fetish call. A scat fetish.
I started out by telling him I was a vegan. I cracked him up. He was laughing so hard, he had to hang up because he couldn’t get back into our fantasy."
- anon, 'A Look In The Lives Of Phone Sex Operators' on hemmy.net, 22 June 2008. Jun 23, 2008
reesetee And they probably serve food in those annoying plastic baskets my brother hates. Oct 24, 2007
uselessness nested...quotes...headache... Oct 24, 2007
chained_bear I guess they could have called it "Food 'n' Scram." Or, you know, taken that opportunity to not annoy skipvia, and do away with the dumb "'n'" there.
Though I'm willing to bet they didn't even spell "'n'" right. I bet they spelled it "'n.'" Or "n." Or even "-n-".
Bastids. Oct 24, 2007
reesetee Oh. Well, now you've spoiled the fun, skipvia. ;-) Oct 24, 2007
skipvia I'm sure the owners of "Food 'n' Scat" meant that you could eat and get out quickly, but the mental image was something entirely other. Oct 24, 2007
reesetee So maybe Food 'n' Scat served...uh...the sharp sound of bullets?
I agree on the 'n' thing, too, skipvia. I once came across a restaurant called Eat 'n' Go. I decided not to take the chance. Oct 24, 2007
chained_bear Other meanings (besides specific excrement) from the OED:
Obsolete/rare: Treasure, money; in ME. only in phr. scat and s(c)rud.
Obsolete/rare: Treasure. (single usage listed is from 1481. Woooo!)
1. a. gen. A tax, tribute. Now only Hist. with reference to countries under Scandinavian rule.
b. In Orkney and Shetland, the land-tax paid to the Crown by a udal tenant. Also, in certain parts of Scotland and the north of England, the designation of various local imposts in the 15-17th c.
2. attrib., as scat-field, tax; scat gild, the payment or tax of ‘scat’; scat haver, malt, oats, malt, taken in payment of ‘scat’; scat land, land subject to ‘scat’.
Dialect.
1. A blow or buffet.
2. ‘Anything burst or broken open; the sound of a rent; the sharp sound of a bullet’ (E.D.D.). Cf. SCAT v.3 and adv.
3. A brief spell of weather; a short turn of work.
4. A sudden or passing shower of rain.
Slang.
U.S., for whiskey.
Jazz.
a. A style of improvised singing in which meaningless but expressive syllables, usu. representing the sound of a musical instrument, are used instead of words.
b. Comb., as scat-singing n., singing in this style; also as adj.; hence scat-singer and (as a back-formation) scat-sing v. trans. and intr.
Slang.
Heroin.
There are a number of definitions of "scat" as a verb as well.
Obsolete: To oppress by exactions.
Obsolete: In phrase to scat and lot (later to scat or contribute) = ‘to scot and lot’, i.e. to contribute equally to the defraying of some charge or cost.
Dialect: To break in pieces, shatter.
Jazz: a. To perform scat-singing; to sing or improvise with meaningless syllables.
b. To sing or improvise (a song) by replacing the words by meaningless syllables.
Dial. to go scat: to fall down; to break in pieces; to become bankrupt.
And finally, colloquial: Begone! Hence used as verb (intr.). Also in phr. quicker than scat. Oct 24, 2007
chained_bear Ha! Skipvia, you must be a kindred spirit. (I'm purposely not going to add that phrase or even see if it's already been added, out of courtesy to seanahan so he can have some more words.) Although, I was very surprised to see several unrelated meanings for "scat" in the OED! Maybe the restaurant owners were using it in a different sense...?
Still... dumb name for a restaurant. Oct 24, 2007
skipvia And I forgot to mention that I absolutely despise store names with 'n' in them. Like "Junk 'n' Stuff"... Oct 24, 2007
skipvia You'll enjoy this one, c_b. Near where I grew up in SC was a diner named "Food 'n' Scat." I never could get up the courage to go in there. Oct 24, 2007
chained_bear According to the OED, "scat" in the sense of "excrement" is not all that specific: "dung. (pl.) droppings."
Usages: 1977 Devon Wetlands (Devon County Council) xix. 74 "The two signs of Otters most likely to be found are their footprints and their droppings (usually known as scats or spraints)... Recognising spraints requires some practice particularly to avoid confusing them with Mink scats.
1977 New Yorker 27 June 70/3 We avoid a mound of bear scat. Oct 24, 2007