Skip to main content
PlainSpell

flatfish

/ˈflætfɪʃ/noun

flatfish is a noun meaning “A fish of the order Pleuronectiformes, the adults of which have both eyes on one side and usually swim with the other side down, such as a flounder…” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled F-L-A-T-F-I-S-H and has 2 syllables, and it appears about once in every 13 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of flatfish is flatfishes.

What does flatfish mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A fish of the order Pleuronectiformes, the adults of which have both eyes on one side and usually swim with the other side down, such as a flounder, a halibut, or a sole.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce flatfish?

  • /ˈflætfɪʃ/

Flatfish has 2 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-flatfish.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of flatfish

  • flatfishes plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is flatfish?

Flatfish appears about once in every 13 million words in written English, the 107,757th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Flatfish in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense fish of the order Pleuronectiformes:

LanguageWords
Frenchpoisson plat
GermanPlattfisch
Portugueselinguado, solha
Spanishpez plano

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does flatfish come from?

From flat + fish.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).