fish
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "fish", 4-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "fish" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "fish" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
fish is aEnglishnoun. It means: A typically cold-blooded vertebrate animal that lives in water, moving with the help of fins and breathing with gills. Pronounced /ˈfɪʃ/. It ranks #1,339 in English word frequency. Often confused with FS and fit.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | fish |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈfɪʃ/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #1,339 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for fish is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈfɪʃ/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,339 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 23 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for fish, with forms such as "ffish", "fihs", and "fishh". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "FS", "fit", "fix", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English fisch, from Old English fisċ (“fish”), from Proto-West Germanic *fisk, from Proto-Germanic *fiskaz (“fish”), from Proto-Indo-European *peysk- (“fish”). Cognates Cognate with Yola wish (“fish”), North Frisian fasch, fask, Fesk (“fish”), S… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is fish, spelled F-I-S-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A typically cold-blooded vertebrate animal that lives in water, moving with the help of fins and breathing with gills.
- 2A paraphyletic grouping of the following taxonomic groups:
- 3A paraphyletic grouping of the following taxonomic groups:
- 4A paraphyletic grouping of the following taxonomic groups:
- 5A paraphyletic grouping of the following taxonomic groups:
- 6A paraphyletic grouping of the following taxonomic groups:
- 7Any animal (or any vertebrate) that lives exclusively in water.
- 8Any animal (or any vertebrate) that lives exclusively in water.
- 9Cod; codfish.
- 10The flesh of the fish used as food.
- 11An aquatic or semiaquatic animal suitable for consumption during fasting on Fridays during Lent.
- 12A 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.
- 13An easy victim for swindling.
- 14A bad poker player. Compare shark (a good poker player).
- 15A makeshift overlapping longitudinal brace, originally shaped roughly like a fish, used to temporarily repair or extend a spar or mast of a ship.
- 16A purchase used to fish the anchor.
- 17A torpedo (self-propelled explosive device).
- 18The thirty-fourth Lenormand card.
- 19A (feminine) woman. (See also fishy.)
- 20A new (usually vulnerable) prisoner.
- 21A male homosexual; a gay man.
- 22A drag queen or transgender woman who looks like a cisgender woman.
- 23A spaceship.
Etymology
From Middle English fisch, from Old English fisċ (“fish”), from Proto-West Germanic *fisk, from Proto-Germanic *fiskaz (“fish”), from Proto-Indo-European *peysk- (“fish”). Cognates Cognate with Yola wish (“fish”), North Frisian fasch, fask, Fesk (“fish”), Saterland Frisian Fisk (“fish”), West Frisian fisk (“fish”), Cimbrian biss, visch, viss (“fish”), Dutch vis, visch (“fish”), Dutch Low Saxon, Mòcheno visch (“fish”), German Fisch (“fish”), German Low German Fösch (“fish”), Luxembourgish Fësch (“fish”), Yiddish פֿיש (fish, “fish”), Danish, Elfdalian, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish fisk (“fish”), Faroese, Icelandic fiskur (“fish”), Gothic 𐍆𐌹𐍃𐌺𐍃 (fisks, “fish”), Crimean Gothic fisct (“fish”). Compare Irish iasc (“fish”), Latin piscis (“fish”).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ffish,fihs,fishh,fissh,fsih,ifsh
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for fish
Misspelling Variants of "fish"
Frequency rank: #1,339 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter F in our English index: