bycatch

bycatch noun: any fish (or other creatures) that are not targeted as a catch but are unintentionally caught, and often discarded back into the sea.

Noun

bycatch (countable and uncountable, plural bycatches)

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
- The nets come up full for once. Jumbo brown shrimp, […] The fish we keep too, […] Among the bycatch is a gorgeous sea slug with a silvery, narrow body no longer than an inch and six dark-blue appendages that reach out like fingers.2025, Trang Thanh Tran, They Bloom at Night, →ISBN, page 35
Any person, animal, or thing, captured unintentionally on camera or film.

Verb

bycatch (third-person singular simple present bycatches, present participle bycatching, simple past and past participle bycaught)

(transitive) To catch unintentionally while fishing for something else.

Forms of bycatch

Noun
plural	bycatches
alternative form	by-catch
Verb
third-person singular present	bycatches
present participle	bycatching
past participle	bycaught
past	bycaught

Origin of bycatch

From by- + catch.

Questions about bycatch

What does bycatch mean?: Bycatch means any fish (or other creatures) that are not targeted as a catch but are unintentionally caught, and often discarded back into the sea.
What part of speech is bycatch?: Bycatch can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of bycatch?: The plural of bycatch is bycatches.

Words near bycatch in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: 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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

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