Meaning

noun an exploratory oil well drilled in land not known to be an oil field

noun a cruelly rapacious person

noun any small or medium-sized cat resembling the domestic cat and living in the wild

originFrom Middle English wyld cat, wylde cat (in the plural as wild cattes, wylde catis, wyle cattes), equivalent to wild + cat. Cognate with Middle Low German wiltkatte, German Wildkatze, Swedish vildkatt. Its adjectival senses were originally American and derived from the "wildcat banks" of Michigan, following its elevation to statehood in 1837. Two laws—one easing the requirements for establishing…

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0