red-handed
- 1In the act of doing something wrong, or showing clear evidence of guilt.
Security cameras caught the cashier red-handed slipping bills into his pocket.
She was found red-handed, the forged checks still in her purse.
Note
Scots law spoke of a person taken with red hand, caught in the act, as early as the 15th century, and the picture is a killer with the victim's blood still on the hands. The blood has drained out of it now: it follows catch, nab or find, usually after the object (caught the cashier red-handed), and covers any wrongdoing, from treason in Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel to a cheating husband.
- 2Having hands that are red with blood.
She came in from the garden red-handed, having gashed her thumb on the shears.
By the end of the shift, the butcher's apprentice was red-handed and exhausted.
Similarbloodied
Note
Because readers expect the "caught in the act" idiom, writers who mean real blood on real hands often add literally: blisters that weep blood can leave someone literally red-handed for the rest of the night. Without that signal, or a setting that makes it plain, such as a butcher's counter or a gardening accident, the phrase will be read as guilt.
- 3Causing death and bloodshed; murderous and violent.
History remembers him as a red-handed tyrant who ruled by the sword.
The red-handed revolt left whole villages in ruins.
Similarbloody, murderous, bloodthirsty
Note
Here the word goes before a noun and keeps its blood: red-handed war, a red-handed tyrant, the red-handed barbarian Conan is taken for in Robert E. Howard's The Phoenix on the Sword. It belongs to dramatic writing, historical fiction and heroic fantasy, and it can be given to a force as well as a person, as when fire runs red-handed through a burning city. Bloody and murderous are the plainer words.
Practice
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Origin
From red + handed, likening the person to a murderer whose hands are red with the victim's blood. To be taken with red hand meant "to be caught in the act" in Scots law from at least the 15th century; Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) has the first recorded taken red-handed, and the expression later became more common as caught red-handed.