Skip to main content
PlainSpell

garfish

noun

garfish is a noun meaning “Any fish of the needlefish family Belonidae, with a long narrow body and needle-shaped jaws, especially the European species Belone belone” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled G-A-R-F-I-S-H, and it appears about once in every 25 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of garfish is garfishes.

What does garfish mean?

noun

  1. 1

    IrelandUKAny fish of the needlefish family Belonidae, with a long narrow body and needle-shaped jaws, especially the European species Belone belone.

  2. 2

    CanadaUSAny North or Central American fish of the family Lepisosteidae.

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

How do you pronounce garfish?

  • US

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Flame,_not_lame-garfish.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of garfish

  • garfishes plural
  • gar-fish

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

How common is garfish?

Garfish appears about once in every 25 million words in written English, the 150,355th 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).

Garfish in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

LanguageWords
Frenchorphie (fish of family Belonidae)
GermanHornhecht (fish of family Belonidae), Knochenhecht (fish of family Lepisosteidae)
Portuguesepeixe-agulha (fish of family Belonidae)
Spanishaguja (fish of family Belonidae)

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 garfish come from?

From Middle English garfysche (“garfish”, literally “spear-fish”), from gor (“spear”) + fisch (“fish”). Cognate with Scots gairfish (“garfish”).

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