red-handed

Meaning

Adjective

• Showing clear evidence of guilt; in the act of wrongdoing.
• Deadly, bloody.
• With hands that are red from blood.

Origin

• From red + handed, likening to a murderer with their hands red with the victim's blood. The phrase to be taken with red hand originally meant "to be caught in the act". The use of red hand in this sense goes back to 15th-century Scotland and Scots law. Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) contains the first recorded use of taken red-handed for someone apprehended in the act of committing a crime. The expression subsequently became more common as caught red-handed.