Word.ws English Dictionary

gyotaku

gyotaku noun: traditional Japanese fish printing.

gyotaku: traditional Japanese fish printing
Image: DigiPub / J.G. Wang, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

gyotaku (uncountable)

  1. Traditional Japanese fish printing.
    • In Japan the tradition of fish printing, or gyotaku, goes back to the 1800s, when fishermen began using ink and paper to record their catch. Ms. Sessler, who studied design in college, began making her fish prints two winters ago, when her husband got home from a long fishing excursion.2007 August 8, Brett Martin, “First a Hook, Then Ink: An Artist’s Catch”, in New York Times

Origin of gyotaku

Borrowed from Japanese 魚拓 (gyotaku, ぎょたく), from Middle Chinese 魚 (ngjo, “fish”) + 拓 (tʰak, “rubbing”).

Questions about gyotaku

What does gyotaku mean?
Gyotaku means traditional Japanese fish printing.
What part of speech is gyotaku?
Gyotaku is a noun.

Words near gyotaku in the dictionary

  1. gynæcophoric
  2. gynæcophorous
  3. gyoji
  4. gyojis
  5. gyokuro
  6. gyotaku
  7. gyoza
  8. gyozas
  9. gyp
  10. gypboard
  11. gypcrete

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gyotaku (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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