Caught

How to spell caught

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce caught

What does caught mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of 'catch': to have seized, captured, or intercepted something.

Caught in a sentence

• I caught the last bus home.

• The cat caught a mouse in the garden.

Where does caught come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the past tense and past participle of 'catch', a verb that entered English in the 1200s from Anglo-Norman French 'cachier', meaning 'to chase or hunt', which itself goes back to the Latin 'captare', 'to try to seize', a frequent form of 'capere', 'to take'. Although 'catch' arrived from French, its irregular past tense 'caught' was modelled on native English verbs like 'teach' and 'taught', which is why the spelling abandons any French look and adopts the Old English '-ught' pattern. That borrowed-but-anglicised history is the heart of the spelling trap: the 'augh' spells a simple 'aw' sound with a wholly silent 'gh', a relic of a guttural sound that English speakers stopped pronouncing centuries ago. The same silent 'gh' lurks in its cousins 'taught', 'fought', and 'bought'. Confusion with the homophone 'court' (a legal or sporting space, from a different Latin root, 'cohors') is the other reason writers stumble over it.

How the word is built

• catch (Old English/Anglo-Norman: to seize, take)
• irregular past-tense vowel change to 'caught'

Words that sound like caught

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• cot: A small bed with high barred sides for a baby or young child.