The story
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865, Alice finds a cat with an enormous grin sitting in the Duchess’s kitchen. When she asks why it grins like that, the answer is short: “It’s a Cheshire cat,” said the Duchess, “and that’s why.”
Later the cat fades away bit by bit, until nothing is left but its grin. Alice remarks that she has often seen a cat without a grin, but never a grin without a cat.
Carroll did not invent the saying. He was born in Daresbury, a village in Cheshire, and by then the phrase was already old. In 1788, Francis Grose’s dictionary of everyday slang explained that it was “said of any one who shews his teeth and gums in laughing.”
So why a cat from Cheshire? Nobody knows. In 1850, a letter writer recalled Cheshire cheeses sold in the shape of a cat, with bristles for whiskers, but no one has found proof that such cheeses were ever made. Another guess blames sign painters whose lions came out looking like cats. Word historians still call the origin a mystery.
