Word.ws English Dictionary

breath-catching

breath-catching adjective: inspiring awe or deep admiration; impressive.

Adjective

breath-catching (comparative more breath-catching, superlative most breath-catching)

  1. Inspiring awe or deep admiration; impressive.
    • The theory was breath-catching, but quickly fell apart when the accountant could give no account of what Sibyl might have done with Theresa's body.2004, Mel Bradshaw, Death in the Age of Steam: A Mystery, →ISBN, page 99
    • Donal Henahan reported that her performance of it was “breath-catching in its vocal warmth and emotional power.”2010, James Neufeld, Lois Marshall: A Biography, →ISBN, page 239
  2. Extremely frightening or overwhelming.
    • To cap the feat, their leader made a breath-catching descent by what mountain men call a rappel, riding down a rope almost 400 feet.1964 June 5, “Now Man Conquers Mt. Eiffel”, in Life, volume 56, number 23, page 106
    • I asked whether he would mind if I looked through them, and after a few minutes I found the map: it was a breath-catching moment for, as I unfolded it, I saw that it must show the deployment of a whole searchlight regiment covering the entire southern half of Belgium.2009, R.V. Jones, Most Secret War, →ISBN
  3. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see breath, catching.

Examples of breath-catching in a sentence

  • For here was a vista that was breath-catching and inspiring, a wholly new thing come into the world.2011, Harry Harrison, Tunnel Through the Deeps, →ISBN:
  • He was moving towards her with a purposefully predatory stride, stopping only when he was breath-catching inches away from her.2014, Elizabeth Power, Back in the Lion's Den, →ISBN:

Forms of breath-catching

comparativemore breath-catching
superlativemost breath-catching

Words formed from breath-catching

Questions about breath-catching

What does breath-catching mean?
Breath-catching means inspiring awe or deep admiration; impressive.
How do you use breath-catching in a sentence?
For here was a vista that was breath-catching and inspiring, a wholly new thing come into the world.
What part of speech is breath-catching?
Breath-catching is an adjective.

Words near breath-catching in the dictionary

  1. breath sprays
  2. breath strip
  3. breath strips
  4. breath test
  5. breath tests
  6. breath-catching
  7. breath-catchingly
  8. breath-holding
  9. breathabilities
  10. breathability
  11. breathable

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: breath-catching (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “breath-catching.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/breath-catching. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.