Meow facts for kids

A cat meowing

A meow or miaow is a cat vocalization. Meows may have diverse tones and are sometimes chattered, murmured or whispered. Adult cats rarely meow to each other; however, they do so occasionally. An adult cat meowing to human beings is a call for attention, food or water.

The meow can be assertive, plaintive, friendly, bold, welcoming, attention-soliciting, demanding, or complaining. It can even be silent, where the cat opens its mouth but does not vocalize. Just as humans may verbalize exhaustively when they are happy, so can cats. According to The Purrington Post, a chatty cat is likely happy too.

A mew is a high-pitched meow often produced by kittens. It is apparently used to solicit attention from the kitten's mother, and adult cats may use it as well. The mew is similar to what is described in Brown et al. 1978 as an isolation call. By around three to four weeks of age kittens do not mew when at least one littermate is present, and at four to five months of age kittens stop mewing altogether.

Spelling

In American English, the spelling "meow" was first used in 1842. Before that, the word could be spelled "miaow", "miau", or "meaw". Of any variant, the earliest attestation of a cat's cry in Early Modern English is from the 1630s.

Language differences

The following table lists the onomatopoeic word for the "miau" or "meow" sound in various languages. In some languages (such as Chinese 喵, miāo, and Thai แมว, mæw), the vocalization became the name of the animal itself.

See also

In Spanish: Maullido para niños

• Cat communication
• Cross-linguistic onomatopoeias
• Devocalization
• Jingle Cats
• Meow the Jewels, a hip-hop album by Run the Jewels with all instrumentals replaced with meowing
• Miao (disambiguation)