## Etymology
A compound of hell and cat, an early seventeenth-century term joining the infernal connotation of hell with the proverbial spitting fierceness of a cat.

## AI Etymology
hellcat is a compound of hell and cat, an early seventeenth-century term joining the infernal connotation of hell with the proverbial spitting fierceness of a cat. Morphologically, the word is best read through the components named in the history, with the modern spelling preserving a compound structure rather than a single unanalyzable stem. In present English, the noun sense is "a spiteful, violent-tempered woman; a fury", so the historical development ends in a clearly identifiable modern dictionary use. The same base also appears in related forms such as hell and cat. Its semantic neighborhood includes shrew, virago, termagant, and fury, which helps locate the modern sense without adding a separate etymological claim. The named historical forms include Old English hell and Old English catt.

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