Word.ws English Dictionary

doctorfish

doctorfish noun: either of the fish Garra rufa and Cyprinion macrostomus, which feed on dead skin while leaving the healthy skin intact.

doctorfish: either of the fish Garra rufa and Cyprinion macrostomus, which feed on dead skin while leaving the...
Image: Dances, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

doctorfish (plural doctorfishes or doctorfish)

  1. Either of the fish Garra rufa and Cyprinion macrostomus, which feed on dead skin while leaving the healthy skin intact.
    • Walking at the Brixton market among the parrotfish, doctorfish and butterfish, Effa Edusie is surrounded by pieces of her childhood in Ghana.2008 January 15, Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Europe’s Appetite for Seafood Propels Illegal Trade”, in New York Times

Forms of doctorfish

pluraldoctorfishes
pluraldoctorfish

Origin of doctorfish

From doctor + fish.

Questions about doctorfish

What does doctorfish mean?
Doctorfish means either of the fish Garra rufa and Cyprinion macrostomus, which feed on dead skin while leaving the healthy skin intact.
What part of speech is doctorfish?
Doctorfish is a noun.
What is the plural of doctorfish?
The plural of doctorfish is doctorfishes.

Words near doctorfish in the dictionary

  1. doctorer
  2. doctorers
  3. doctorese
  4. doctoress
  5. doctoresses
  6. doctorfish
  7. doctorfishes
  8. doctorhood
  9. doctorial
  10. doctorially
  11. doctorin'

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: doctorfish (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “doctorfish.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/doctorfish. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.