Fisheries

How to spell fisheries

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce fisheries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fisheries mean?

1. nounThe industry, places, or waters concerned with catching and harvesting fish, often as managed or regulated areas.

Fisheries in a sentence

• The collapse of the cod fisheries devastated the coastal economy.

• New quotas were introduced to protect the country's offshore fisheries.

Where does fisheries come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word is the native Old English fisc, meaning 'fish', a word shared across the Germanic languages and ultimately reaching back to a common ancestor that also gave Latin its piscis. To this old root English attached the suffix -ery, a productive ending borrowed through Old French from the Latin -arius, which forms nouns naming a trade, an activity, or the place where it happens; the same suffix sits inside bakery, brewery, and nursery. 'Fishery' therefore came to mean the business of catching fish or a stretch of water where that catching is done, and is recorded from around the sixteenth century. The plural 'fisheries' broadened to cover the whole industry and the bodies that regulate it, as in government departments and conservation policy. The spelling trap is the join between the silent-looking -ery and its plural -ies: the single letter shifts from -y to -ies, giving fisher-ies rather than the tempting fisherys.

How the word is built

• fish (the animal/the catching of fish)
• -ery (place or trade suffix)
• -ies (plural of -ery, with -y becoming -ies)