miscatch

English

Etymology

mis- +‎ catch

Pronunciation

• (noun) IPA^(key): /ˈmɪskætʃ/
• (verb) IPA^(key): /mɪsˈkætʃ/

Noun

miscatch (plural miscatches)

1. (fishing) A catch in which the wrong type of fish is caught, and so must be released.
   • 1858, The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal:

     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.

   • 1859, Walter White, Northumberland, and the Border, page 242:

     At temperatures below fifty, the proportion of catch to miscatch is almost equal ; between fifty and sixty degrees the proportion is about four catches to one miscatch.

   • 2017, Zhenli Huang, Bingfang Wu, Three Gorges Dam: Environmental Monitoring Network and Practice, page 133:

     Investigating types and number of fishing gears; catch per unit of effort by different fishing gears; miscatch amount and bycatch ratio of fish banned.

2. The act of catching in which the thing that is caught is then dropped; a fumble.

   Hypernym: misfield

   Coordinate term: misthrow

   • 1899, Montague Shearman, Football: History, page 142:

     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.

   • 1921, American Builder - Volume 31, page 113:

     We regret the slip, but then we take consolation in the fact that the best of jugglers sometimes make a miscatch.

   • 1981, Marian Jenks Wirth, Games for Growing Children, page 128:

     Children are sometimes poor sports simply because they have never been told exactly how to be a good sport. Role-playing or teacher demonstration of misthrows or miscatches is often helpful and fun.

   • 1996, Wallace Herbert Doebler, Summer Along the Clinton: A History of the Clinton River Parks:

     They caught him after a couple of miscatches and falls in the grass and dirt.

3. An act of catching in which something is caught wrongly, such as in the wrong position.
   • 2002, Textile Trends - Volume 45, page 32:

     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.

   • 2019, Kristin J Holtgrew-Bohling, Large Animal Clinical Procedures for Veterinary Technicians, page 48:

     A miscatch is where the animal's neck is not in the appropriate area and the animal is not caught as it is intended to be. When a miscatch occurs, adjustments should be made so that proper restraint is applied. If a procedure is performed while the animal is experiencing a miscatch, it is considered inhumane.

4. A misperception or misidentification.
   • 1964, Harvard University. Computation Laboratory, Mathematical Linguistics and Automatic Translation, page 14:

     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).

   • 1989, John Schmidt, Growing Up in the Oil Patch, page 42:

     A miscatch of sound, slip of hand, waver in decision and $100,000 is dropped into a mile-deep hole never again to be fished up.

Verb

miscatch (third-person singular simple present miscatches, present participle miscatching, simple past and past participle miscaught)

1. To make a miscatch (any sense).
   • 1890 February, Mrs. M. A. O'Neil, “Amanuenses Work From a Woman's Stand-Point”, in The Journal of Commercial Education, volume 5, page 166:

     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?"

   • 1899, Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner, The Writings of Mark Twain, page 191:

     After a pause she added these words, memorable forever; words whose meaning she may have miscaught, misunderstood; as to that we can never know; words which she may have rightly understood; as to that, also, we can never know; but words whose mystery fell away from them many a year ago and revealed their real meaning to all the world:

   • 1995, Ung Kim, Joon-Sung Chang, Seung-Han Park, 21st International Congress on High-Speed Photography and Photonics:

     Auto detection can be interrupted any time by the user if the program miscatches the markers.

   • 2002, James Flint, 52 Ways to Magic America, page 70:

     Marty miscaught his coin and sent it spinning across the room, where it disappeared under the sofa.

   • 2004, William O. Roberts, Bull's Handbook of Sports Injuries, page 256:

     Boutonniere injuries occur at the PIP finger joint with a disruption of the central slip of the extensor tendon mechanism as a result of longitudinal force to the finger such as that from a basketball that is miscaught.

2. To stutter or break the flow of words when speaking.
   • 1913, Lippincott's Monthly Magazine: Volume 92:

     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.

   • 1982, Greg Barron, Groundrush, page 5:

     On occasions when he might have discussed Gray with someone other than Jeannie, an anxiety would paw at his throat, his voice would miscatch, and his mind would stutter over what he'd meant to say.