first catch your hare

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for first catch your hare is 21 letters long, classified as a proverb. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Make sure you have a thing before you decide what to do with it.".

No misspelling variants are generated for first catch your hare in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: Supposedly from an error in The Art of Cookery by Hannah Glasse, where "catch" should have read "case" (i.e. remove the skin); however, this is apocryphal. Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is first catch your hare, spelled F-I-R-S-T- -C-A-T-C-H- -Y-O-U-R- -H-A-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.