Meaning
A hyperbolic warning that going out into cold or wet weather, or going out inadequately dressed, will make you seriously ill - literally, that you will catch a cold that kills you. No death is actually implied: it is hyperbole for catching a very bad cold, and it survives as a stock parental and grandparental warning, chiefly in British English. Almost always a second-person warning, often clipped to catch your death with of cold understood; Cambridge labels it informal. Keep it distinct from a fate worse than death and the other death idioms already catalogued here - the death in this phrase is pure exaggeration. Regional use: Chiefly British, including Irish and northern English dialect use.
Origin
The idiom is built on catch cold, the ordinary word for contracting the illness, whose noun sense of cold Etymonline dates to the 1530s. The fatal twist came later: Ammer's Dictionary of Cliches dates catch one's death (of a cold) to the late 1800s, often used as a warning. The full phrase was already colloquial in northern England in that era: the Yorkshire dialect song On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at warns 'Tha's bahn to ketch thi deeath o' cowd' - you are bound to catch your death of cold - with the gloss and dates verified on Wikipedia: the tune Cranbrook composed by Thomas Clark in 1805, the lyrics of unknown authorship traditionally dated to the 1850s-1870s, first published in 1916. One popular account is resisted: Writing Explained claims the original idiom was catch your death, from which catch a cold evolved, but the chronology does not hold - the illness sense of cold (1530s) predates the hyperbole by roughly three centuries, so catch your death is the later exaggeration, not the origin.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- catch one's death of a cold
- catch your death
- take your death of cold
Usage Examples
- 'Put that coat on or you'll catch your death of cold' was my grandmother's farewell every winter morning of my childhood.
- He went out with wet hair to scrape the windscreen and caught his death of cold; he was coughing for a fortnight.
- Do not sit in the draught by the door - you'll catch your death.