Isn't it "caught a cold"? I'm not a native speaker, so maybe this is not a mistake.

Maybe it's archaic or dated usage. Let me check.

You can find example of it on the Web
Google: "he|she caught cold"
https://www.google.com/search?q...caught+cold%22

Thanks!

It could be a UK/dialectal thing too

It's not "archaic or dated" in the UK. In the UK, it's normal, present-day usage to say 'to catch a cold'. I would say 'caught a cold' here.

Interesting. I've never encountered the form "catch cold" before, but it exists: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/catch_cold#English. It seems to be Nigerian English and to a lesser degree Indian English:

https://trends.google.com/trend...20a%20cold%22.

On this list, Japan is No. 4.

*waves to everyone* 😊

"Caught cold" appears about 20 times in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), showing sources like Vanity Fair, NPR, literature.org, etc.

It appears over 200 times in the iWeb Corpus.

I didn't check other tenses.

> It's not "archaic or dated" in the UK. ....

I suspected this was so. I think perhaps it might sound a bit dated in America. However, we read books by British authors and older American authoers, too, so it didn't feel so strange to me as I was recording the audio.

I've always thought 'catch cold' was regional, dialectal. I wouldn't say "I have cold," but "I have a cold."

@CK You're saying "catch cold" is more recent than "catch a cold"?

I would guess that "caught cold" is older. Often what seems dated in America, but are still used in England are words and phrases that came over with early colonists.


I just checked Google Books Ngram viewer and it seems to support this.

https://books.google.com/ngrams...20cold%3B%2Cc0

In a lot of cases, British English has evolved its own words and usages, and older words and uses have remained in the US. To me, 'gotten', for example, sounds Shakespearean.

Yes. Not only language usage, but a number of British folk songs were collected in the Appalachian Mountains.

Perhaps this was the most famous collector.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Sharp