Etymology: see caterwaul v.: the noun is apparently from the verb.

Etymology: This occurs in the various forms caterwrawe, -wawe, -wrawl(e, -wawle, -waul. The second element appears separately in the verb wrawen used (of a cat) by Caxton, wrawlen, wraule of cats, squalling children, etc., frequent in Googe, Tusser, Holland, and others from c1570 to 1625 or later; waul is of doubtful occurrence before 1600. The precise relation between these is not clear; all are probably imitative of the sound, but whether the forms in -l are formed on the others (compare mew, mewl, German miauen, miaulen, and French miauler) is doubtful.Forms akin to wrawe , wrawl in other languages are Danish vraale , Swedish vråla , to roar, bellow, bawl, Norwegian dialect råla , in the north of Norway ‘to cry as a cat’, Low German wralen (Bremen Wörterbuch) said of a stallion in heat, also of an ill-behaved man, ‘to be noisy and unruly’; compare also Bavarian rauen , rauelen ‘to howl, whine’, said especially of the cat, also Swiss rauen , räulen , the latter especially of the cry of the cat when in heat. (Wr- becomes r- in High German: an Old English *wreawlian , Middle English wrawlen would answer exactly to Bavarian rauelen .) The sense of the German words also comes near the English, since both in Chaucer and in the transferred use of the 16–17th cent., the word was specifically applied to the cry and behaviour of the cat when ‘after kind’. As to the -waul form, an exact Low German counterpart katterwaulen ‘(von Kindern) schreien und heulen wie streitende Katzen’ is given by Schambach, Göttingisches Grubenhagen'sches Idiotiken 1858, but its history is uncertain; compare also Icelandic vála to wail. Cater is, of course, connected with cat n.¹, but the form is not certainly explained: some would see in it a parallel to Dutch and German kater male cat, which may once have existed in Old English; but the word appears too late to prove this. Others would take -er as some kind of suffix or connective merely.