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• cat's cradle
  cat's cradle

  noun

  a children's game in which two players alternately stretch a looped string over their fingers in such a way as to produce different designs.
• Cat's Cradle
  Cat's Cradle

  noun

  a novel (1963) by Kurt Vonnegut.

cat's cradle

¹ American  

noun

1. a children's game in which two players alternately stretch a looped string over their fingers in such a way as to produce different designs.

2. the intricate design formed by the string in this game.

3. intricacy; complexity.

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Cat's Cradle ² American  

noun

1. a novel (1963) by Kurt Vonnegut.

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cat's cradle British  

noun

1. a game played by making intricate patterns with a loop of string between the fingers

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Etymology

Origin of cat's cradle

First recorded in 1760–70

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

cat's cradle Cat's Cradle

By the 1880s, a cat’s cradle of submerged telegraph lines wound around the globe.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 26, 2026

Up in the bucket of the scissor lift, she maneuvered through her huge cat’s cradle, cinching lines and crocheting them with larger stitched panels to create dense splashes of color among the trees.

From New York Times ● Jun. 22, 2023

Krasnostein skips from subject to subject and returns, with the fluidity of a string wound for a game of cat’s cradle — in and out and back where she started.

From Washington Post ● Mar. 11, 2022

The noodle master in the open kitchen stretches and twists the strings of dough as if mimicking a game of cat’s cradle.

From Seattle Times ● Mar. 3, 2022

Hilda said, and at last I felt I had touched a human string in the cat's cradle of her heart.

From "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath

As an example, he pointed to Irving Langmuir, a chemistry Nobel laureate, colleague of Vonnegut’s brother, and the inspiration for the amoral physicist in Cat’s Cradle.

From Science Magazine ● Nov. 10, 2022

As in Cat’s Cradle or Catch-22, humanity is trapped within an ever more vicious circle created by its own skewed logic and techno-dependency.

From The Guardian ● Mar. 6, 2021

Before he began cooking, he recalls, he was “a very good hippie” and a founder of Cat’s Cradle, an influential local music club that celebrated its 50th anniversary last year.

From New York Times ● Apr. 7, 2020

It’s possible the CIA subscribed to the belief that, like ice-nine in Cat’s Cradle, polywater was capable of uncontrollably self-replicating.

From Slate ● Nov. 8, 2013

As promised in the list, she brought a Kurt Vonnegut book, Cat’s Cradle, and she read aloud to me, her soft voice mingling with the the frogs’ croaking and the grasshoppers landing softly around us.

From "Looking for Alaska" by John Green