catching

1. 1.

   (baseball) playing the position of catcher on a baseball team

   Broaderplaying

   baseball

2. 2.

   the act of detecting something; catching sight of something

   Synonymsdetectionespialspyingspotting

   Broaderdiscovery
3. 3.

   becoming infected

   “catching cold is sometimes unavoidable”

   “the contracting of a serious illness can be financially catastrophic”

   Synonymscontracting

   Broaderacquiring

1. 1.

   (of disease) capable of being transmitted by infection

   Synonymscommunicablecontagiouscontractabletransmissibletransmittable

   Similarinfectious

Other forms of catching

plural

catchings·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about catching

What does catching mean?

catching means "(baseball) playing the position of catcher on a baseball team". That is the primary sense; the word has 4 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in catching?

catching has 2 syllables: cat-ching. The stress falls on "cat". In IPA it is /ˈkætʃɪŋ/.

What is another word for catching?

Close synonyms include detection, espial, spying, spotting, contracting. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is catching a common word?

catching is banded "Common" — everyday vocabulary in speech and writing. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.