tom

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   an abbreviation of tome or volume in older bibliographic citations, especially citations to French works

   The footnote directs the reader to tom. iii of the collected works.

2. 2
   noun

   a male cat, especially one that has not been neutered

   The old tom guarded the barn from unfamiliar cats.

3. 3
   noun

   a male turkey or, less commonly, a male of certain other animals

   The wild tom spread his tail feathers during courtship.

Appears in

Simplified etymology

Tom has long been used, like Jack, as a representative name for an ordinary man. Tom, Dick, and Harry first appeared in an 18th-century song and came to mean a large number of ordinary people. In the 19th century the British army used Thomas Atkins as the name of a fictitious enlisted man, and from the 1880s Rudyard Kipling helped popularize Tommy as a name for the ordinary British soldier.

The animal term uses the common male name Tom generically, as in tomcat. The bibliographic abbreviation has a separate source: French tome ("volume"), ultimately from Latin tomus and Greek tomos ("section, volume").

Topics

External links

• Google Images
• Cambridge Dictionary
• Wiktionary