A wild cat, especially a cougar, lynx, or mountain lion; also used regionally for the bobcat.
Possibly from 'cat of the mount' (mountain cat) or a corruption of the Dutch 'kattermount.' The term appeared in American English by the 1600s referring to wild felines.
Native Americans lived with catamounts for thousands of years, but early European colonists had never seen mountain lions before, so they used this folk etymology 'cat of the mount' to describe these fierce predators they encountered.
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