Word: Grimalkin

The Word of the Day for Mar 05 is:
grimalkin \grih-MAWL-kin\ noun

: a domestic cat; especially : an old female cat

Example sentence:
The family grimalkin, dreaming, perhaps, of mousing days long past, twitched her tail as she dozed contentedly on the windowsill.

Did you know?

In the opening scene of "Macbeth," one of the three witches planning to meet with Macbeth suddenly announces, "I come, Graymalkin." The witch is responding to the summons of her familiar, or guardian spirit, which is embodied in the form of a cat. Shakespeare's "graymalkin" literally means "gray cat." The "gray" is of course the color; the "malkin" was a nickname for Matilda or Maud that came to be used in dialect as a general name for a cat (and sometimes a hare), and for an untidy woman as well. By the 1630s, "graymalkin" had been altered to the modern spelling "grimalkin."

My sentence:
"Grimalkin" is not a word that one hears in the everyday American lexicon.