Certain it is that the word tabby only referred to the marking or stripes, not to the absolute colour.

But it might also, one would suppose, with as much justice, be called a taffey cat, unless the calendering of “taffey” caused it to become “tabby”. This stuff, in bygone times, was often called tabby: hence the cat with lines or markings on its fur was called a “tabby” cat. The word tabby was derived from a kind of taffeta, or ribbed silk, which when calendered or what is now termed watered, is by that process covered with wavy lines. Harrison Weir, in his book Our Cats And All About Them, dated 1889, describes the origins as this: The name tabby is believed to have derived from Atabi, which is a type of striped taffeta (known as tabbi) that was manufactured in the Attabiah district of Baghdad in the Middle East. Agouti ( symbolised with an uppercase A) is dominant over almost all other coat colours with an exception for the white masking and white spotting genes. Ticked Abyssinian catĭomestic cats inherited the agouti gene from their wild cat ancestors, the African wildcat ( Felis silvestris lybica). Agouti hairs are most obvious on the ticked tabby (such as the Abyssinian or Singapura) who only has the agouti background but not the stripes, spots or sworls.

The tabby gene is known as agouti and produces a background that is made up of individual hairs that have alternate banding ( ticking).

The tabby cat is not a breed, but a coat colour that can be found in both mixed breed and purebred cat populations. Tabby is a coat pattern among domestic cats (purebred and mixed-breed) that features an agouti pattern of alternating dark and pale bands of colour along the hair shaft with contrasting darker spots, stripes or sworls and a prominent M on the forehead.

Big muscular gray tabby cat