fish

Meanings

Noun

  • A cold-blooded vertebrate animal that lives in water, moving with the help of fins and breathing with gills.
  • Any animal (or any vertebrate) that lives exclusively in water.
  • Cod; codfish.
  • The flesh of the fish used as food.
  • A card game in which the object is to obtain cards in pairs or sets of four (depending on the variation), by asking the other players for cards of a particular rank.
  • A woman.
  • An easy victim for swindling.
  • A bad poker player. Compare shark (a good poker player).
  • A makeshift overlapping longitudinal brace, originally shaped roughly like a fish, used to temporarily repair or extend a spar or mast of a ship.
  • A purchase used to fish the anchor.
  • A torpedo (the self-propelled explosive device).
  • A paraphyletic grouping of the following extant taxonomic groups:
  • The thirty-fourth Lenormand card.
  • a new (usually vulnerable) prisoner
  • A period of time spent fishing.
  • An instance of seeking something.
  • A counter, used in various games.

Verb

  • To hunt fish or other aquatic animals in a body of water.
  • To search (a body of water) for something other than fish.
  • To use as bait when fishing.
  • To (attempt to) find or get hold of an object by searching among other objects.
  • To talk to people in an attempt to get them to say something, or seek to obtain something by artifice.
  • Of a batsman, to attempt to hit a ball outside off stump and miss it.
  • To repair (a spar or mast) by fastening a beam or other long object (often called a fish) over the damaged part (see Noun above).
  • To hoist the flukes of.

Related

Similar words

Narrower meaning words

  • Cephalaspidomorphi, Chondrichthyes, Osteichthyes
  • seafood

Origin

  • From Middle English fisch, from Old English fisċ, from Proto-West Germanic *fisk, from Proto-Germanic *fiskaz (compare West Frisian sv, Dutch vis, Danish fisk, Norwegian fisk, Swedish fisk, German Fisch), from Proto-Indo-European *peysḱ- (compare Irish iasc, Latin piscis).
  • Deverbal from to fish (etymology 3).
  • From Old English fiscian, from Proto-West Germanic *fiskōn, from Proto-Germanic *fiskōną.
  • Borrowed from French fiche ("peg, mark").

Modern English dictionary

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