Cats refers to an animal of the family Felidae:. It commonly describes a person:, a strong tackle used to hoist an anchor to the cathead of a ship, and short form of cat-o'-nine-tails, which gives the term a broader and more practical sense than a single short definition would suggest. Depending on context, it can also point to a sturdy merchant sailing vessel (now only in "catboat"), the game of "trap and ball" (also called "cat and dog"), and the pointed piece of wood that is struck in the game of tipcat, so the category can cover literal uses, related ideas, and more figurative extensions of the same core meaning. Taken together, these meanings present Cats as a flexible theme rather than a narrowly technical label, covering the central idea people usually mean when they use the word while still leaving room for closely related senses that appear in real language. Additional shades of meaning include a vagina, a vulva; the female external genitalia, a double tripod (for holding a plate, etc.) with six feet, of which three rest on the ground, in whatever position it is placed, a wheeled shelter, used in the Middle Ages as a siege weapon to allow assailants to approach enemy defences, a program and command in Unix that reads one or more files and directs their content to the standard output, and a catapult, which reinforce how the category can stretch across adjacent but still recognizable uses of the same term.
