Other forms: caught, catches, catching
To catch is to get your hands on something before it gets away. A ball out of the air, a glass sliding off the table, a bus you reach with one minute to spare.
The range is enormous and almost all of it is everyday. You catch a cold, catch a train, catch a fish, catch a thief. You catch what someone says - 'sorry, I didn't catch your name' - and you catch a person doing something they should not be doing. A sleeve catches on a nail, and dry wood catches fire. As a noun, a catch is the day's fish, the little metal fastening on a window, and the hidden problem inside a good offer: what's the catch? The past tense is caught, never catched.
1verbcatchTo take hold of something moving through the air.~33%
“She throws him the keys and he catches them without looking.”
2verbcaptureTo stop and hold a person or animal that is trying to get away.~33%
“They set traps to catch the fox that had been raiding the bins.”
synonyms: capture
3verbbusTo get on a bus, train or plane before it leaves.~2%
“I catch the 7:40 from Reading every morning.”
4verbillnessTo get an illness from someone or somewhere.~2%
“Wash your hands or you will catch whatever he has.”
5verbhearTo hear or understand something that was said.~2%
“Sorry, I didn't catch the last part.”
6verbdiscoverTo discover someone doing something wrong.~22%
“If they catch him copying answers, he is out of the exam.”
7verbbecomeTo become stuck or held on something.~2%
“My sleeve catches on that nail every time I walk past.”
9nounsmallA small fastening on a door, window or bag.~2%
“The catch on the bathroom window was rusted shut.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense (8 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Catch and chase are the same word, taken into English twice. Middle English cacchen came from Anglo-Norman cachier, while chase came from the central French chacier - both from Latin captio and capto, forms of the verb for seizing. The odd past tense caught may be borrowed manners: it looks as if catch copied the old past tense of latch, a verb that meant much the same thing.
Proto-Indo-European
*kap-
Middle English
cacchen
English, today
catch
From Middle English cacchen. From Middle English cacchen, from Anglo-Norman cachier, variant of Old French chacier, from Latin captio, from Latin captō, frequentative of capiō. Akin to Modern French chasser (from Old French chacier) and Spanish cazar, and thus a a doublet of chase. Compare a doublet of ketch. Via PIE cognate with have. Displaced Middle English fangen "to catch"; > Modern English fang, from Old English fōn (“to seize, take”); Middle English lacchen "to catch" and heavily displaced Modern English latch, from Old English læċċan. The verb became irregular, possibly under the influence of the semantically similar latch (from Old English læċċan), whose past tense was lahte, lauhte, laught (Old English læhte), until becoming regularised in Modern English.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA