Catcher

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈkæt͡ʃə/

Definitions

1. An individual responsible for fielding and retrieving pitched balls in baseball, as well as any mechanism or person designed to grab or seize objects
2. A player in baseball stationed behind the batter to catch pitches and tag base runners, alongside any entity that captures or holds something coming towards it
3. The player positioned behind the batter in baseball who receives pitched balls and may attempt to tag runners ; any apparatus or individual that captures, secures, or retrieves objects or items

Etymology: The noun "catcher" is a straightforward formation: the verb "catch" with the agent suffix "-er", meaning one who catches. The suffix itself has a long pedigree, descending through Old English "-ere" from a Germanic ancestor and, further back, from Latin "-arius", which Romans attached to nouns to name a person connected with something. The verb behind it has a more tangled route. It comes from a Latin word "captus", meaning "taken" or "seized", which belonged to the verb "capere", "to take". Vulgar Latin turned this into "captiare", meaning "to try to catch", and the sense of chasing and seizing passed through Old French "chacier", which is also the source of "chase". Anglo-Norman and Middle English then reshaped it into "cacchen", the ancestor of modern "catch". In its sense of the player who stands behind the batter in baseball, the word is simply the ordinary agent noun applied to a role, with no special coinage behind it.

Synonyms: receiver, interceptor