When two adult cats meet, they do not usually greet each other with meows. Cats communicate through scent, posture, facial expression, touch and a wider repertoire of vocalisations that includes hisses, growls, yowls, trills and purrs. The familiar meow is unusual because it is rare in cat-to-cat interactions and cat colonies but typical of cat-human interactions.
That does not mean adult cats never meow at one another. Meows can occur during territorial disputes, mating and other feline encounters. But reviews of feline communication consistently describe the adult domestic cat’s meow as more common with humans than with other cats.
So why do cats retain this particular sound around us? Part of the answer appears to begin in kittenhood. The rest lies in the way cats and humans learn to respond to one another.
Where the meow begins
Kittens produce cries when they are separated from their mother or exposed to discomfort. In an observational and experimental study of eight litters, researchers even found that kitten vocalisation changed in response to isolation, cold and restraint, as well as with age during the first six weeks of life. These calls help a dependent kitten attract attention when it cannot solve the problem by itself.
As cats mature, communication with other cats relies heavily on scent and body language, while kitten-like meowing becomes less prominent in interactions with their own species. Many domestic cats nevertheless continue using meows with humans throughout adulthood.
Bjarne O. Braastad, a professor of animal behaviour at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, interprets this as a wider tendency for animals living with people to retain juvenile behaviours that obtain a useful response. In Braastad’s account, animals use elements of their infant behaviour toward humans because they discover that those behaviours work.
The transition may begin when a kitten enters a new home. As Braastad puts it, “When a kitten goes to a new home, it will try to use the same sounds with its humans.” A person who responds with food, warmth, attention or an opened door gives the kitten a reason to keep using them.
How cats adapted their voices to life with people
The traditional account of cat domestication begins around early farming settlements. Stored grain attracted rodents, rodents attracted wildcats, and the presence of those cats benefited people. Archaeological research describes this as a commensal process in which rodents around grain stores may have drawn cats into human settlements without people initially setting out to breed them as domestic animals.
The history is no longer as simple as the familiar story suggests. A major ancient-DNA study published in Science in 2025 analysed 87 ancient and modern cat genomes and found that domestic cats did not spread into Europe with Neolithic farmers. Instead, cats ancestral to Europe’s domestic population appear to have arrived from North Africa about 2,000 years ago. The researchers noted that uncertainty remains over whether initial domestication occurred in the Levant, Egypt or elsewhere within the African wildcat’s range.
Whatever the precise route, prolonged life around people appears to have affected feline vocal behaviour. In a 2011 experiment, researchers compared 25 feral cats with 13 house cats while exposing them to five social situations, including approaches by a familiar caretaker, a threatening stranger and strangers accompanied by a dog or another cat.
The feral cats were generally more defensive and produced higher overall call rates. Both groups meowed, hissed and growled, but the acoustic characteristics of their calls differed.
How well do humans understand a meow?
If cats direct so many meows toward people, how accurately can we interpret them? Not especially well. A peer-reviewed study titled “What’s in a Meow?”, by Gabriella Prato-Previde and colleagues, played people individual meows recorded in three situations: waiting for food, isolation in an unfamiliar place and being brushed.
The researchers selected both highly representative calls and less typical examples from each context. Participants then tried to identify the situation in which each meow had been recorded.
Performance was poor. Even when the researchers considered only the most representative meows, participants’ accuracy was never significantly above chance. The food-related meow was recognised most often, with 40.44 percent of responses correct, while the isolation meow was correctly identified only 26.67 percent of the time.
Experience helped to a limited degree. Cat owners were more accurate than nonowners in all three contexts, with statistically significant differences for isolation and brushing. But ownership did not provide anything resembling a reliable feline dictionary.
What this means for the sounds cats make at home
Once you know that adult housecats use meows mainly with people, familiar household behaviour begins to look different. A cat may vocalise while standing beside its bowl, waiting at a door, greeting its owner or seeking contact.
The meaning often comes from the complete interaction: where the cat is standing, what it is looking at, how often the sound is repeated and what has happened immediately beforehand. This may explain why people can understand their own cats reasonably well in daily life while performing poorly when asked to classify an unfamiliar cat’s isolated recording.
Repeated responses can also help establish a household routine. A meow near the bowl is followed by food; a call near the door is followed by the door opening.
In short, the meow is unmistakably a feline sound, but in adult domestic cats it has become an unusually human-facing one. It begins as part of a kitten’s care-seeking repertoire, is used relatively little between adult cats and becomes one of the most common sounds in cat-human interactions. Rather than a secret language with a fixed translation, the household meow is better understood as a flexible signal whose meaning depends on the cat, the situation and the human listening.
