The title refers to a fictional bureaucratic stipulation that embodies illogical and immoral reasoning.[8] The opening chapter of the novel was first published, in 1955, by New World Writing as Catch-18, but Heller's agent, Candida Donadio, asked him to change the title, to avert its confusion with Leon Uris's recently published Mila 18.[19] A reference was made to this nomenclatural history in the 2023 Netflix show Beef.[20] The implications in Judaism of the number 18 – which refers to chai, meaning "alive", in Gematria – were relevant to Heller's somewhat greater emphasis on Jewish themes in early drafts of his novel.[21] Heller's daughter Erica wrote that the Simon & Schuster editor, Robert Gottlieb, was the person who came up with the number 22, and Gottlieb himself stated that he did in the documentary Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb.[22]
Parallels among a number of character exchanges in the novel suggested the doubled-one title of Catch-11, but the 1960 release of Ocean's Eleven eliminated that.[19] Catch-17 was rejected so as not to be confused with the World War II film Stalag 17, as was Catch-14, apparently because the publisher did not believe that 14 was a "funny number". Eventually, the title came to be Catch-22, which, like 11, has a duplicated digit, with the 2 also referring to a number of déjà vu-like events common in the novel.[21]
