- 1當場逮到、人贓俱獲；catch someone red-handed 就是「抓個正著」。
Almost always used in the phrase 'catch someone red-handed': to catch a person at the exact moment they are doing something wrong, so there is nothing to argue about. The strength of the phrase is the timing — not found out later, not suspected, but caught in the act, with the evidence right there in their hands. It is used for real crime (a thief caught inside the shop) and just as often for small, ordinary wrongs, half-joking: a child caught taking , a colleague caught reading someone else's screen. It goes after the verb, not before a noun; you catch someone red-handed, you get caught red-handed. 'Caught' is by far the usual verb.
「catch someone red-handed」是這個字最常見的用法，意思是在對方正做錯事的那一刻把他抓個正著，讓人沒辦法再辯解。這個說法的重點在時間點：不是事後才查出來，也不是只有懷疑，而是當場人贓俱獲。
它可以用在真正的犯罪上，也很常用在小小的、半開玩笑的過錯，例如小孩偷拿餅乾被抓到。red-handed 接在動詞後面，如「you get caught red-handed」，最常搭配的動詞是 caught。
From the word’s history
From red + handed, likening to a murderer with hands red with the victim's blood.
red 加 handed，比喻凶手雙手還沾著被害者的血。
組成red + handed ('having hands of this kind'). The picture is a killer whose hands are still red with the victim's blood. The Scots law phrase 'taken with red hand' meant caught in the act, and goes back at least to the fifteenth century in medieval Scotland. Sir Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe (1819) has the first recorded 'taken red-handed', and 'caught red-handed' became the common form after that.
同家族的字
- red-facedsame red + -ed pattern, where -handed / -faced means 'having hands / a face of this kind'
- empty-handedsame -handed pattern: arriving or leaving with nothing in your hands