Word.ws English Dictionary

catching hell

catching hell is the present participle and gerund of catch hell.

Meaning of catch hell

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

Questions about catching hell

What is catching hell the present participle and gerund of?
Catching hell is the present participle and gerund of catch hell.

Words near catching hell in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: catching hell (page history and authors); 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.

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