Word.ws English Dictionary

by-catch

by-catch is the alternative spelling of bycatch.

Meaning of bycatch

Noun

bycatch (countable and uncountable, plural bycatches)

  1. Any fish (or other creatures) that are not targeted as a catch but are unintentionally caught, and often discarded back into the sea.
    • Some offer him bags of bycatch—fish too small or net-mangled to sell, rays and seahorses few will want, and so on.2022, N. K. Jemisin, The World We Make, Orbit, page 107
  2. Any person, animal, or thing, captured unintentionally on camera or film.

See all 3 meanings of bycatch

Forms of by-catch

pluralby-catches

Questions about by-catch

What is by-catch the alternative spelling of?
By-catch is the alternative spelling of bycatch.

Words near by-catch in the dictionary

  1. by-blows
  2. by-book
  3. by-books
  4. by-business
  5. by-businesses
  6. by-catch
  7. by-catches
  8. by-cause
  9. by-causes
  10. by-effect
  11. by-effects

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: by-catch (page history and authors); bycatch (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: “by-catch.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/by-catch. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.