Word.ws English Dictionary

catch hell

catch hell verb: to be severely reprimanded, punished, or beaten.

Verb

catch hell (third-person singular simple present catches hell, present participle catching hell, simple past and past participle caught hell)

  1. (idiomatic, slang) To be severely reprimanded, punished, or beaten.
    • It’s not exactly a Pixar-level examination of complicated family dynamics, and the movie still has plenty of knuckled-headed, Sandler-style boys-will-be-dumbasses shtick: Children everywhere will surely thrill to the sub-subplot about Frank catching hell about his gambling problem from his wife...2018 July 10, Jesse Hassenger, “Improbably but amusingly, Hotel Transylvania 3 notches a series best”, in The Onion AV Club, archived from the original on 09 Jul 2018
    Synonyms:
    catch it, cop it, get it
  2. (idiomatic, slang, uncommon) To experience troubling or difficult times.
    • The family on the other side of town / Would catch hell without a ghetto around / In every city you find the same thing going down / Harlem is the capital of every ghetto town / Help me sing it1972, Bobby Womack, “Across 110th Street”, in Across 110th Street
    • I'm catching hell living here alone / Hmm, I never realized, oh, Lord / That you mean so much to me / I'm catching hell living here alone1977, Natalie Cole, “I'm Catching Hell”, in Unpredictable

Synonyms of catch hell

Forms of catch hell

third-person singular presentcatches hell
present participlecatching hell
past participlecaught hell
pastcaught hell

Questions about catch hell

What does catch hell mean?
Catch hell means to be severely reprimanded, punished, or beaten.
What part of speech is catch hell?
Catch hell is a verb.
What is the past tense of catch hell?
The past tense of catch hell is caught hell.

Words near catch hell in the dictionary

  1. catch fences
  2. catch fire
  3. catch flies
  4. catch hands
  5. catch heat
  6. catch hell
  7. catch hold
  8. catch in 4k
  9. catch in possession
  10. catch it
  11. catch it in the neck

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: catch hell (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-catch hell.ogg.

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