Other forms: catchiest, catchier
Catchy means so memorable you cannot stop humming it. A catchy tune, catchy chorus, a catchy slogan.
It is praise for a melody and neutral for a slogan — catchy means it sticks rather than that it is good. The stuck-in-the-head phenomenon is called an earworm, a translation of the German Ohrwurm, and repetition with a small unexpected interval is what causes it. Note that a catchy tune is engineered rather than lucky in most commercial music.
1adjectivecatchySo memorable you cannot stop humming it.
“The song has such a catchy tune that I've been singing it all day.”
synonyms: memorable, infectious
catchy is a quality of memorability.
Proto-Indo-European
*kap-
Middle English
cacchen
English
catch
English, today
catchy
From catch + -y. catch comes 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