Fishy

How to spell fishy

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fishy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fishy mean?

1. adjectiveArousing doubt or suspicion; seeming dishonest or not quite right.
2. adjectiveSmelling or tasting of fish.

Fishy in a sentence

• The accountant noticed something fishy about the quarterly figures.

• The kitchen still had a fishy odour after she fried the salmon.

• The unusually low price for the car seemed fishy to the buyer.

• The sauce tasted slightly fishy because of the anchovies.

Where does fishy come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word fish comes from the Old English fisc, the native Anglo-Saxon name for the cold-blooded water animal, and it has close cousins across the Germanic languages, including the Old Norse fiskr and the German Fisch. The adjective fishy was formed straightforwardly within English by adding the suffix -y, which turns a noun into an adjective meaning 'resembling' or 'full of', so fishy first simply meant 'like a fish' or 'tasting of fish'. By the late 1500s and 1600s the word was also used for places or smells associated with fish. The familiar figurative sense, 'suspicious' or 'not quite trustworthy', grew in the early 1800s, probably from the idea that a fishy smell betrays something gone off or not fresh. Because the word is built on the plain root fish plus a single -y, the spelling holds no real trap beyond remembering it ends in a single y.

How the word is built

• fish (the animal/food)
• -y (adjective suffix meaning 'characterised by')