Abyssinian Cat Colors: One Coat, Five Dictionaries

Here is the sentence that untangles half the Abyssinian ads on the internet: "Ruddy," "Usual" and "Tawny" are not three colors. They are three registries' own words for the identical warm, burnt-sienna coat. No other breed on this site carries a naming split this clean. This page maps who says what, then explains the gene that makes the coat itself one of the most interesting in the fancy.

The five-registry palette map

CFA (US) recognizes exactly FOUR colors: Ruddy, Cinnamon (as "Red" historically), Blue and Fawn. Anything else is a disqualification, and no silver class exists. TICA (US/international) recognizes twelve: six traditional (Ruddy, Cinnamon, Chocolate, Blue, Fawn, Lilac) plus a full Silver Division mirroring all six. GCCF (UK) runs the richest palette of the five: 28 named colors.

Its eight bases (Usual, its word for ruddy; Sorrel, its word for cinnamon; Blue, Chocolate, Lilac, Fawn, Red, Cream) come each again in Silver, plus Tortie and Tortie-Silver classes. Canada's CCA-AFC recognizes four (Ruddy, "Sorrel (Cinnamon)", Blue, Fawn), no silver. Australia's ACF also four (Tawny, its own unique word for ruddy, plus Blue, Cinnamon, Fawn) with their silver forms. Same cat, five rulebooks. A UK ad for a "Usual" kitten, an Australian ad for a "Tawny" and a US ad for a "Ruddy" all describe one color.

The gene behind the ticked coat

The Abyssinian is the textbook ticked tabby: every hair banded with alternating warm and dark color, no stripes on the body. The genetics turned out richer than the textbooks. What breeders long called the Ta allele is now understood as its own "Ticked locus" on cat chromosome B1: a SEPARATE gene from the Tabby locus that decides mackerel versus blotched, a separation only established around 2009-2010. In 2021 a candidate gene was proposed: DKK4, a developmental signaling gene.

And the story is still moving. TICA's own 2024 explainer uses a different allele naming (Ti-ck, Ti-A) from the 2021 paper's DKK4 variants, and no published source yet reconciles the two conventions. So we print both rather than merging them. The genotype the breed standard effectively requires, per GCCF's own breeding policy (the clearest statement anywhere in our research): two copies, Ta/Ta, which fully masks any underlying stripe pattern.

Silver, chocolate and lilac: the boundary colors

Three colors mark exactly where the registries disagree. Silver (the ticked coat over a silvery-white base) is recognized by TICA, GCCF and ACF, and refused by CFA and CCA-AFC. Chocolate and Lilac exist as their own named colors at TICA and GCCF only. So whether a "silver Abyssinian" is a show cat or a disqualification depends entirely on whose show hall you are standing in. That is a genuinely useful fact for a buyer reading imported-pedigree paperwork.

Eyes, and what nobody ranks

Across the standards, eye color runs gold to green, with rich, deep tones preferred. And one honest absence: no registry publishes color rarity or popularity counts for this breed. So every "rarest Abyssinian color" listicle is guesswork. What our price research found instead is cleaner: no source in any of our four markets ties Abyssinian price to coat color at all. That makes this one of the few breeds we cover where the color conversation is purely aesthetic.

Five registries, one card