Fishery

How to spell fishery

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce fishery

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fishery mean?

1. nounAn area of water where fish are caught, or the industry and activity of catching and selling fish.

Fishery in a sentence

• The local fishery supplies fresh cod to restaurants along the coast.

• New quotas were introduced to protect the salmon fishery from overfishing.

Where does fishery come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Fishery is built from the native English word 'fish', which descends from Old English 'fisc', a word shared across the Germanic languages and reaching back to a common ancestor meaning simply the swimming creature we still know today. To it English added the suffix '-ery', borrowed from Old French '-erie' and ultimately from Latin, which forms nouns naming a place, trade, or activity (as in bakery, brewery, and nursery). The combined form appears from around the sixteenth century, first meaning the business or practice of catching fish and later the specific waters or grounds where fishing is carried on. Because '-ery' attaches to the ordinary noun, the spelling is reassuringly regular: keep the whole word 'fish' and simply add the ending. The same pattern that gives us 'pottery' and 'archery' explains why fishery ends in -ery rather than -ary.

How the word is built

• fish (the animal/the catch)
• -ery (place or activity suffix)