Also cat-cradle. [Origin probably fanciful: the guess that it ‘may have been’ cratch-cradle is not founded on facts.]
A children’s game in which two players alternately take from each other’s fingers an intertwined cord so as always to produce a symmetrical figure.
1768. Tucker, Lt. Nat. (1852), I. 388. An ingenious play they call cat’s cradle; one ties the two ends of a packthread together, and then winds it about his fingers, another with both hands takes it off perhaps in the shape of a gridiron, the first takes it from him again in another form, and so on alternately changing the packthread into a multitude of figures whose names I forget, it being so many years since I played at it myself.
1823. Lamb, Elia, Christ’s Hosp., 326. Weaving those ingenious parentheses called cat-cradles.
1867. Trollope, Chron. Barset, II. lxvii. 246. Old Mr. Harding … was in bed playing cat’s-cradle with Posy.
attrib. 1824. Edin. Rev., XL. 84. One of those cats-cradle reasoners who never see a decided advantage in any thing but indecision.
1887. Pall Mall Gaz., 29 Sept., 3/2. He [Trollope] delivered us from the marvels, senseless accidents, and cat’s-cradle plots of old romance.
