like shooting fish in a barrel
"like-shooting-fish-in-a-barrel" is a 25-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“like shooting fish in a barrel” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a prep_phrase. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 30
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Extremely easy; sometimes with a connotation of triumph but at other times with a connotation of being meaningless and unsatisfying.
Corpus desk
Index EN-like-shooting-fish-in-a- · like shooting fish in a barrel · English
like shooting fish in a barrel · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 30 letters
- VOW-10 10 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "L" 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 | like shooting fish in a barrel |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Prep_phrase |
| Letters | 30 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “like shooting fish in a barrel” in English
Rare enough to double-check
like shooting fish in a barrel is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as aprep_phrase. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Extremely easy; sometimes with a connotation of triumph but at other times with a connotation of being meaningless and unsatisfying.".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for like shooting fish in a barrel, since its letter pattern doesn't lend itself to common typo substitutions. No confusable counterpart is on file for this word, since its spelling is unusual enough that it doesn't cluster with a lookalike.
This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is like shooting fish in a barrel, spelled L-I-K-E- -S-H-O-O-T-I-N-G- -F-I-S-H- -I-N- -A- -B-A-R-R-E-L.
Definition
- 1Extremely easy; sometimes with a connotation of triumph but at other times with a connotation of being meaningless and unsatisfying.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how like shooting fish in a barrel appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Opponents contend that the lumbering creatures are so easy to shoot that a moose hunt is a slaughter, not a sport. "It's like shooting fish in a barrel," they say.
For a photographer, shooting twins at the annual Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, must be like shooting fish in a barrel.
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.