A purse net stretched on a stiff wire ring with a long pole as a handle is known as ein Kescher in German. It is practically indistinguishable from a North German accenting of the English word catcher, with the difficult English A assimilated to a German E and the unfamiliar T dropped. Many terms of nautical German have a close affinity with terms used on English coasts, and it is plausible to suppose that fishermen on both sides of the North Sea, or Mare Frisicum, would have bought and sold hand nets under this name. So far, we have not obtained any evidence for this, and do not wish to create a folk etymology: this proposed connection is purely a hypothesis. If it were to be correct, we would have a curious situation, since there is a less modified loanword with a similar source, der Catcher, in German. The latter is a pseudo-Anglicism to mean a wrestler. Its root is in the same English verb, to catch. The Duden remains agnostic about der Kescher, tracing the etymology to a word Kesser in Mittelniederdeutsch and adding "weitere Herkunft ungeklärt". Nowadays, a Kescher (also spelled Käscher) is just as likely to be a child's butterfly-net plaything at the beach, or a skimming net used to clean a swimming pool. Der Kescher is capitalized, given masculine gender, inflected with s in the genitive and is the origin of the verb keschern, meaning to fish something out of water with a catcher net.
Kescher, der
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