From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishtabbytab‧by /ˈtæbi/ noun (plural tabbies) [countable] DHPa cat with light and dark lines on its fur —tabby adjective
Examples from the Corpus
tabby• On the front cover, a dilute tabby looks nobly if nervously to its right.• He was a long-haired tabby she had found in the kitchen garden, old and nearly dead from starvation.• Not even a sinister black cat, but a large and lazy-looking tabby.• The first cats of this type were what we today call striped or mackerel tabby, covered with thin, dark lines.• Within an old tabby wall are the grounds of the Stafford house, burned down over a hundred years ago.• The two-year-old tabby was horrifically injured in a road accident.• This, it seems, is how the history of the tabby began.• This tabby was no cheap date.Origin tabby (1600-1700) tabby type of striped cloth ((16-19 centuries)), from French tabis, from Medieval Latin attabi, from Arabic, from Al-'Attabiya part of Baghdad where the cloth was originally made 