fishwife
"fishwife" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“fishwife” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 8
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A woman who sells or works with fish; a female fishmonger.
Corpus desk
Index EN-fishwife · fishwife · English
fishwife · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 8 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "F" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | fishwife |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 8 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “fishwife” in English
Rare enough to double-check
fishwife is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 4 senses are on record.
Zero misspellings are on record for fishwife in our index, a sign its spelling follows regular English conventions. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, since its spelling is unusual enough that it doesn't cluster with a lookalike.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English fysshewyfe; equivalent to fish + wife (“(obsolete) woman”) (see also midwife). The correct English form is fishwife, spelled F-I-S-H-W-I-F-E.
Definition
- 1A woman who sells or works with fish; a female fishmonger.
- 2A vulgar, abusive or nagging woman with a loud, unpleasant voice.
- 3A person, especially a woman, with poor personal hygiene.
- 4The wife of a homosexual man.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how fishwife appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
[S]he was angry with herself; and, for that, sang the more loudly the most wicked and risqué of her slang songs, that gave the morals of a Messalina in the language of a fish-wife, and yet had an inalienable, mischievous, contagious, dauntless French grace in it withal.
Etymology
From Middle English fysshewyfe; equivalent to fish + wife (“(obsolete) woman”) (see also midwife).
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.