fish
noun · verb
Simple meaning
A cold-blooded animal with fins and gills that lives in water
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
fishIPA pronunciation (US)
ˈfɪʃ
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
countable
A typically cold-blooded vertebrate animal that lives in water, moving with the help of fins and breathing with gills.
zoology
A paraphyletic grouping of the following taxonomic groups
Roman Catholicism
An aquatic or semiaquatic animal suitable for consumption during fasting on Fridays during Lent.
A placoderm (paraphyletic class †Placodermi).
A spiny shark (paraphyletic class †Acanthodii)
In infraphylum Gnathostomata
verb
intransitivetransitive
To hunt fish or other aquatic animals in a body of water, or to collect coral or pearls from the bottom of the sea.
intransitive
To (attempt to) find or get hold of an object by searching among other objects.
Seek indirectly
intransitivefollowed by "for" or "around for"
To talk to people in an attempt to get them to say something, or seek to obtain something by artifice.
transitive
To draw or guide (a wire or cable) by means of fish tape.
transitive
To search (a body of water) for something other than fish.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- A1 · Beginner (estimated)
- Frequency
- Very Common
- Typical Use
- General English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: A typically cold-blooded vertebrate animal that lives in water, moving with the help of fins and breathing with gills.
Used this way, fish is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use fish
- “In Japan most fish is eaten raw.”noun
- “The shark is a large fish.”noun
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Inflected forms
Grammatical variations of the same word.
The act of someone who fishes as a diversion.
Someone whose occupation is catching fish.
Word family
Words built from the same root.
Related to A typically cold-blooded vertebrate animal that lives in water, moving with the help of fins and breathing with gills.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
Similar to but smaller than the dobsonfly.
A cookout where fried fish is the main course.
Small tree of West Indies and Florida having large odd-pinnate leaves and panicles of red-striped purple to white flowers followed by decorative curly winged seedpods.
Any of various genus of fish.
An upright geranium having scalloped leaves with a broad color zone inside the margin and white or pink or red flowers.
Gelatinous substance obtained by boiling skins fins and bones of fish.
Related Words
Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.