Miscatch
noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A catch in which the wrong type of fish is caught, and so must be released.
"Forty-five vessels had, during the whole fishing time, fished 3266 times and caught 21,623 barrels of herrings, consequently on an average 6.66 barrels every time the nets were laid; however, there having been 882 times a miscatch, the above-named number really has been caught in 3266-882=2,384 times fishing. Hence the catch of every time of fishing amounts to 9.1 barrels."
- 2 The act of catching in which the thing that is caught is then dropped; a fumble.
"On dealing with a shot which is coming rather higher he should stand square to the kicker with his body well behind his hands, in the event of a miscatch or fumble."
- 3 An act of catching in which something is caught wrongly, such as in the wrong position.
"It is necessary to jet the water of about 50-100mm at the end of free flying, as lower/ smaller than this limit to instabilise the weft causing mispick or miscatch problems on the other side thus causing the machine to stop."
- 4 A misperception or misidentification.
"Thus, miscatches on indices may well to detected after only two groups of tests, one group on a prediction index and the other on the corresponding syntactic word class index, instead of after a minimum of six as in the former version of the program (five groups of tests on the prediction indices and one group on the syntactic word class indices)."
- 1 To make a miscatch (any sense).
"How great a stumbling block to a good dictator would be the amanuensis who lacks concentration of mind, or through carelessness miscatches a word, and calls out to him in the midst of a brilliant flow of ideas, “wait please, I have not caught the word." or, "excuse me, did you say so and so?""
- 2 To stutter or break the flow of words when speaking.
"A woman near—her face livid in the stage-light and her eyes like cairngorms—miscaught a line and laughed aloud. Her panic at the sound of her own voice alone, was that of a doe parted from the herd."
Example
More examples"Forty-five vessels had, during the whole fishing time, fished 3266 times and caught 21,623 barrels of herrings, consequently on an average 6.66 barrels every time the nets were laid; however, there having been 882 times a miscatch, the above-named number really has been caught in 3266-882=2,384 times fishing. Hence the catch of every time of fishing amounts to 9.1 barrels."
Etymology
From mis- + catch.
More for "miscatch"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.