Word.ws English Dictionary

like shooting fish in a barrel

like shooting fish in a barrel prepositional phrase: extremely easy; sometimes with a connotation of triumph but at other times with a connotation of being meaningless and unsatisfying.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (simile) Extremely easy; sometimes with a connotation of triumph but at other times with a connotation of being meaningless and unsatisfying.
    • Opponents contend that the lumbering creatures are so easy to shoot that a moose hunt is a slaughter, not a sport. "It's like shooting fish in a barrel," they say.1982 April 2, Associated Press, “Entrants Gamble For Chance To Stalk Big Game”, in The Dispatch, USA, retrieved 18 Jul 2012, page 20
    • For a photographer, shooting twins at the annual Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, must be like shooting fish in a barrel.2003 October 24, Ken Johnson, “Art in Review: Mary Ellen Mark—‘Twins’”, in New York Times, retrieved 18 Jul 2012

Synonyms of like shooting fish in a barrel

Questions about like shooting fish in a barrel

What does like shooting fish in a barrel mean?
Like shooting fish in a barrel means extremely easy; sometimes with a connotation of triumph but at other times with a connotation of being meaningless and unsatisfying.
What part of speech is like shooting fish in a barrel?
Like shooting fish in a barrel is a prepositional phrase.

Words near like shooting fish in a barrel in the dictionary

  1. like robbing a baby
  2. like rolling off a log
  3. like shelling peas
  4. like shit
  5. like shit through a goose
  6. like shooting fish in a barrel
  7. like sin
  8. like sixty
  9. like smack
  10. like so
  11. like someone owns the place

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: like shooting fish in a barrel (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-like shooting fish in a barrel.ogg.

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