catch cold

Idioms  

1. Also, catch one's death (of cold). Become infected with a cold virus, contract a bad cold, as in Jane manages to catch cold on every important business trip, or Put on your hat or you'll catch your death. The first term originally (16th century) meant becoming chilled by exposure to cold and took on its present meaning in the late 1600s. The hyperbolic variant, often shortened, is somewhat newer.

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

catch cold

The same technique being used to catch cold case killers also is being used to identify unidentified cold case bodies.

From Fox News ● Feb. 14, 2020

The world unravels, but then at the end of the film, the aliens conveniently catch cold and die, and Cruise’s nuclear family turns out to be still happily intact.

From The Guardian ● Jun. 3, 2016

To those obvious considerations we can add that parents catch cold less often, which must offer a small earnings boost.

From New York Times ● Nov. 14, 2012

Increasingly, when Asia sneezes, as it did last week in Hong Kong, America will catch cold.

From Time Magazine Archive

And yet it occurred to Penelope that the children should not be kept indoors too much at first; it might prove a shock to their systems and cause them to catch cold.

From "The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: Book I: The Mysterious Howling" by Maryrose Wood