Catbath
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A session of grooming, in which a cat cleans its own fur or that of another cat using its tongue.
"After a while, I wondered where Iggy had gotten to. I found him in the empty tub, taking a cat bath, his leg luxuriously up in the air being scrubbed tongue clean. I guess he wanted a “real” bath where mommy takes hers."
- 2 A quick wash by wiping or dabbing the skin, especially of one's face. figuratively
"He hitched himself over to the jug at once, and hefting it as lightly as if it were a wine cup, drank a long, long draught. Then he wet a corner of his sleeve, and cleaned the grime and blood-clot and cobweb off his face and hands as best he could. He spent some while at this, and the girl watched. When he was done he looked better, but his catbath had revealed the scars on one side of his face: old scars long healed, whitish on his dark skin, four parallel ridges from eye to jawbone, as if from the scraping talons of a huge claw."
- 3 A form of foreplay, chiefly in Southeast Asian sex work, in which one participant licks the other all over their body.
"‘Cat bath, hmm, I wonder what that is?’ I said, trying to imagine what it involved."
- 4 Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see cat, bath.
Example
More examples"After a while, I wondered where Iggy had gotten to. I found him in the empty tub, taking a cat bath, his leg luxuriously up in the air being scrubbed tongue clean. I guess he wanted a “real” bath where mommy takes hers."
Etymology
From cat + bath.
More for "catbath"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.