Why do cats have “siete vidas” (seven lives) in Spanish, not nine?

In English a cat has nine lives; in Spanish it has siete vidas — seven. The line gets used exactly like its English cousin, for a cat that pulls off something reckless and survives, like one clawing up a sheer wall after a near-fall. The mismatch isn’t random: seven is a heavily loaded number in Spanish-speaking culture, echoing the seven deadly sins, the seven wonders, and the seven days of the week.

The cat in this clip nearly falls from a high wall while a crowd below holds up a sheet to catch it — the kind of stunt that earns the line ha gastado una de sus siete vidas, “it’s used up one of its seven lives.” English settled on nine partly through an old rhyming proverb (“three to play, three to stray, three to stay”); Spanish never adopted that count, so the number stayed at seven across Spain and most of Latin America.