Word.ws English Dictionary

fish wrap

fish wrap noun: a newspaper or magazine, especially one whose news reports are considered uninteresting or unreliable and whose editorial opinions are regarded with indifference or disapproval.

Noun

fish wrap (countable and uncountable, plural fish wraps)

  1. (derogatory, humorous, slang) A newspaper or magazine, especially one whose news reports are considered uninteresting or unreliable and whose editorial opinions are regarded with indifference or disapproval.
    • Just as the sports pages are a first-read when the home team is hot and fish wrap when they are not, consumers tuned out when the market tanked, snapping off CNBC and leaving their business magazines in the to-do pile.2005 May 30, David Carr, “Bad Business For Magazines About Business”, in New York Times, retrieved 02 Dec 2020
    • By now, one would expect those of us in the daily fish wrap business to be inured to repeated attempts to declare the newspaper dead and begin shoveling dirt on its face.2008 June 9, Bill Virgin, “Will you read Microsoft's obit here?”, in Seattle Post-Intelligencer, retrieved 02 Dec 2020
    Synonyms:
    fish wrapper, rag

Synonyms of fish wrap

Forms of fish wrap

pluralfish wraps
alternative formfishwrap
alternative formfish-wrap

Origin of fish wrap

From the traditional practice of wrapping takeaway fish and chips in sheets of newspaper.

Words formed from fish wrap

Questions about fish wrap

What does fish wrap mean?
Fish wrap means a newspaper or magazine, especially one whose news reports are considered uninteresting or unreliable and whose editorial opinions are regarded with indifference or disapproval.
What part of speech is fish wrap?
Fish wrap is a noun.
What is the plural of fish wrap?
The plural of fish wrap is fish wraps.

Words near fish wrap in the dictionary

  1. fish up
  2. fish warden
  3. fish water
  4. fish wheel
  5. fish wheels
  6. fish wrap
  7. fish wrapper
  8. fish wrappers
  9. fish wraps
  10. fish'd
  11. fish-and-chip

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fish wrap (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-fish wrap.wav.

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