The Cheshire Cat is a fictional cat popularised by Lewis Carroll's depiction of it in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Cheshire Cat has had a notable impact on popular culture. Cheshire is an English county famous for its cheese, salt mining and silk. The Cheshire Cat's grin is reminiscent of the vagaries of human character or of a trickster.
The phrase appears in print in John Wolcot's pseudonymous Peter Pindar's Pair of Lyric Epistles in 1...
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The Cheshire Cat is a fictional cat popularised by Lewis Carroll's depiction of it in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Cheshire Cat has had a notable impact on popular culture. Cheshire is an English county famous for its cheese, salt mining and silk. The Cheshire Cat's grin is reminiscent of the vagaries of human character or of a trickster.
The phrase appears in print in John Wolcot's pseudonymous Peter Pindar's Pair of Lyric Epistles in 1792: "Lo, like a Cheshire cat our court will grin." Earlier than that, in A classical dictionary of the vulgar tongue, Francis Grose, The Second Edition, Corrected and Enlarged, London 1788 (unpaginated): "CHESHIRE CAT. He grins like a Cheshire cat; said of any one who shows his teeth and gums in laughing."
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable says grinning like a Cheshire cat is "an old simile, popularised by Lewis Carroll". Brewer adds, "The phrase has never been satisfactorily accounted for, but it has been said that cheese was formerly...
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