Fishes

How to spell fishes

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fishes

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fishes mean?

1. verbThird-person singular present of fish: to try to catch fish, or to search for something by feeling around.
2. nounPlural of fish, used especially when referring to several different species or kinds.

Fishes in a sentence

• verb

  Every weekend he fishes for trout in the river behind the house.

• noun

  The aquarium displays tropical fishes of many different species in one tank.

• verb

  She often fishes in her bag for her keys while juggling the shopping.

• noun

  The textbook lists the freshwater fishes found across the region.

Where does fishes come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the inflected form of 'fish', which descends directly from the Old English noun and verb 'fisc', meaning a creature living in water. The word belongs to the native Germanic core of English and has close cousins across the family: German 'Fisch', Dutch 'vis', and the ancestral root also surfaces in Latin 'piscis', the source of 'piscine' and the zodiac sign Pisces. The '-es' ending was added because English regularly inserts an 'e' before the plural or third-person 's' when a word already ends in a hissing 'sh' sound, which is exactly why we write 'fishes' rather than 'fishs'. As a plural noun, 'fishes' has a specialised life: while 'fish' is the usual plural for a quantity of the animals, 'fishes' is preferred when speaking of several different species or kinds. That spelling rule, adding '-es' after 'sh', is the only real point to remember.

How the word is built

• fish (Old English fisc: a fish)
• -es (verb third-person singular / noun plural suffix)