pat [LME] First recorded for a blow with something flat, pat is probably imitative of the noise. The late 16th-century pat meaning ‘readily’ and in phrases such as to have something off pat, ‘to have memorized perfectly’, were probably originally the same word. In early use it often appears as to hit pat, as if with the hand. In the early 20th-century Australian expression on your pat, ‘on your own’, pat is a shortening of rhyming slang Pat Malone, ‘alone’, although there is no record of a particular person referred to. The English mid 20th-century equivalent, on your tod, however, comes from the name of the American jockey Tod Sloan (1874–1933). One sense of patter [E17th] ‘the sound of little pats’ developed from pat. The patter of little (or tiny) feet is from Longfellow’s ‘The Children’s Hour’ (1860) ‘I hear in the chamber above me / The patter of little feet, / The sound of a door that is opened, / And the voices soft and sweet.’ But the sense ‘smooth talk or coded language’ [M18th] is a development of the medieval paternoster, ‘to say your prayers’ from the Latin for the ‘Our Father’ which opens the Lord’s Prayer.