Fishermen

How to spell fishermen

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce fishermen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fishermen mean?

1. nounMore than one person who catches fish, either for a living or for sport.

Fishermen in a sentence

• The fishermen hauled their nets in before the storm reached the harbour.

• Local fishermen complained that the new quotas were cutting their income.

Where does fishermen come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of fisherman, a compound built entirely from native English roots. The first element comes from the Old English fisc, simply meaning 'fish', which traces back to a shared Germanic ancestor that also gave German Fisch and Dutch vis. To that the agent suffix -er was added, the same ending that turns 'bake' into 'baker' and 'farm' into 'farmer', giving 'fisher', a word for someone who catches fish that is recorded in English for well over a thousand years. The element 'man' was then attached to specify the person, and the whole compound 'fisherman' became common from the sixteenth century onward. The plural follows the irregular pattern of 'man', which shifts its vowel to 'men' rather than taking a regular -s, so the trap for spellers is remembering it ends in 'men' and not 'man' when more than one person is meant.

How the word is built

• fish (the animal/verb, Old English fisc)
• -er (agent suffix: one who)
• men (irregular plural of man)

Words that sound like fishermen

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• fisherman: A person who catches fish, either for a living or as a sport.