What it means
Mostly one thing, with a long tail of other things it used to mean. It has been an adjective, an adverb, a noun and a unit of emphasis, and its one steady habit is that it is never used solemnly.
Askew, off true
The main use. Something that should be lined up and is not.
“The frame went up cattywampus, and so did everything under it.”
Crosswise, diagonal
Laid across the grain of the room rather than along it. A close cousin of cater-cornered, which later became kitty-corner.
“Set the chairs cattywampus across the corner.”
Utterly, completely
An older, rowdier sense, which even had its own adverb: catawampusly.
“He was catawampusly late.” · archaic
Ill-tempered, contrary
A grumpy sense recorded in American regional word lists a century ago.
“A cattywampus mood and nothing to do about it.” · archaic
A beast
The word spent part of the nineteenth century as a noun, and the thing it named had claws. See below.
In the wild
- The bookshelf went up cattywampus, so every ball that touched it rolled left.
- By nine in the morning the whole plan was cattywampus. The map was fine; the compass was the problem.
- The parade turned cattywampus when the tuba section took the corner early.
- Hair cattywampus, shirt inside out, coffee in the wrong hand — but on time.
Where it came from
Nobody knows, and the people who study this for a living are refreshingly honest about it. Three good guesses are on the table:
cater + something
An obsolete verb cater meant to set or move a thing diagonally — the same word behind cater-cornered. That cater goes back to French quatre, four.
Scottish wampish
To wriggle, twist or swerve about. A tempting second half for a word that never went straight.
Pure 1830s nonsense
A jokey pseudo-classical coinage: cata- bolted onto the front to make a plain word sound Greek, from a slang era that loved exactly that trick.
It turns up in American English by the 1830s and has been misbehaving ever since. Regional, informal, and stubbornly alive.
Say it, and spell it
cat·ty·WOM·pus
The stress lands on the third beat: kat-ee-WOM-pus.
Then pick a spelling. Nobody is going to stop you — the word has never settled on one.
The wampus cat
Before it was an adjective, catawampus was also a noun: a nineteenth-century American name for a fearsome imaginary animal. Sometimes it was a mountain lion, sometimes an imp, sometimes a thing no two witnesses could describe the same way.
A wampus cat still patrols Southern tall tales, and the mascots of a school or two that decided to own it. If a word can be askew, it can also have teeth.
Neighbours
Nothing in English is short of words for badly lined up.