fishwife
fishwife noun: a woman who sells or works with fish; a female fishmonger.
Noun
fishwife (plural fishwives)
- A woman who sells or works with fish; a female fishmonger.
- [S]he was angry with herself; and, for that, sang the more loudly the most wicked and risqué of her slang songs, that gave the morals of a Messalina in the language of a fish-wife, and yet had an inalienable, mischievous, contagious, dauntless French grace in it withal.1867, Ouida [pseudonym; Maria Louise Ramé], “Cigarette en Bienfaitrice”, in Under Two Flags: A Story of the Household and the Desert. […], volume II, London: Chapman and Hall, […], →OCLC, page 121
- Synonyms:
- fishmongeress, fishwoman, piscatrix
- A vulgar, abusive or nagging woman with a loud, unpleasant voice.
- Synonyms:
- shrew
- A person, especially a woman, with poor personal hygiene.
- The wife of a homosexual man.
Synonyms of fishwife
Forms of fishwife
| plural | fishwives |
|---|
Origin of fishwife
From Middle English fysshewyfe; equivalent to fish + wife (“(obsolete) woman”) (see also midwife).
Words formed from fishwife
Questions about fishwife
- What does fishwife mean?
- Fishwife means a woman who sells or works with fish; a female fishmonger.
- What part of speech is fishwife?
- Fishwife is a noun.
- What is the plural of fishwife?
- The plural of fishwife is fishwives.
Words near fishwife in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: fishwife (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-fishwife.wav.
Cite this entry: “fishwife.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fishwife. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.