Catfish

How to spell catfish

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce catfish

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does catfish mean?

1. nounA scaleless freshwater or marine fish with long whisker-like barbels around its mouth.
2. nounA person who adopts a false identity online, typically to deceive someone into a relationship.
3. verbTo deceive someone by pretending to be a different person online.

Catfish in a sentence

• noun

  The river is full of catfish, which feed along the muddy bottom.

• noun

  The woman she had been messaging turned out to be a catfish using stolen photos.

• verb

  Scammers often catfish lonely users by inventing a perfect partner.

• noun

  He fried the catfish in cornmeal for a southern supper.

• noun

  Police warned that the charming stranger was a catfish after money.

• verb

  He was furious to learn that someone had tried to catfish his sister on a dating app.

Where does catfish come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound joining 'cat' and 'fish', both ancient native words. 'Cat' descends from the Old English catt, itself part of a wide European family of similar words for the household animal, while 'fish' comes from the Old English fisc, the everyday term for a creature living in water. The compound was coined to describe a group of bottom-dwelling fish whose long, drooping sensory barbels around the mouth look strikingly like a cat's whiskers; the name has been recorded in English since at least the 1600s. In the twenty-first century the word took a sharp new turn: after the 2010 documentary and the television series both titled 'Catfish', the term came to mean someone who pretends to be a different person online, usually to start a deceptive romantic relationship. The spelling is mercifully regular, since it is simply two familiar words written together with no joining letters to forget.

How the word is built

• cat (the animal, from Old English catt)
• fish (Old English fisc), a compound named for the whisker-like barbels resembling a cat's whiskers