Word.ws English Dictionary

fishwives

fishwives is the plural of fishwife.

Meaning of fishwife

Noun

fishwife (plural fishwives)

  1. (archaic) 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
  2. (derogatory) A vulgar, abusive or nagging woman with a loud, unpleasant voice.
    Synonyms:
    shrew
  3. (Geordie, derogatory) A person, especially a woman, with poor personal hygiene.
  4. (slang) The wife of a homosexual man.

Questions about fishwives

What is fishwives the plural of?
Fishwives is the plural of fishwife.

Words near fishwives in the dictionary

  1. fishwich
  2. fishwiches
  3. Fishwick
  4. fishwife
  5. fishwifely
  6. fishwives
  7. fishwoman
  8. fishwomen
  9. fishworker
  10. fishworkers
  11. fishworks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fishwives (page history and authors); 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.

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