Catgut is tough cord made from animal gut, used for strings. A catgut string, stitched with catgut, restring it with catgut.
No cat was ever involved: it is made from sheep or goat intestine, and the name is probably an alteration of something else entirely. It was the standard material for violin strings, tennis rackets and surgical stitches before synthetics.
1nouncatgutTough cord made from animal gut, used for strings.
“The old violin was still strung with catgut.”
catgut is a cord.
Possibly a shortening of cattlegut, or an alteration of kitgut, kit being an old word for a small fiddle.
Possibly an abbreviation of the word cattlegut. Alternatively, it may derive by folk etymology from kitgut or kitstring — the word kit, meaning fiddle, having at some point been confused with the word kit for a young cat.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA