kitty [E18th] The pet name for a cat is a form of the earlier word kitten [LME]. Both ultimately go back to chitoun, an Old French pet form of chat ‘cat’. When a successful person is said to scoop the kitty [E20th] their success has nothing to do with cats, but looks back to the use of kitty in northern English as a word for a prison. By the end of the 19th century it was being used generally in gambling as a name for the pool of money that is staked—to be scooped up by the luckiest player.