Word.ws English Dictionary

pelagic

/pəˈlæd͡ʒɪk/

pelagic adjective: living in the open sea rather than in coastal or inland waters.

Adjective

pelagic (comparative more pelagic, superlative most pelagic)

  1. Living in the open sea rather than in coastal or inland waters.
    • Besides, seeing a shark in an aquarium tank is not the same as seeing a shark in the wild, in its natural, pelagic habitat.1983, Richard Ellis, The Book of Sharks, Knopf, →ISBN, page 13
    • The main fish species in freshwater ponds in China are silver carp, bighead carp, grass carp, common carp, crucian carp, black carp (Mylopharyngodon piceus), mud carp (Cirrhinus molitorella), etc. According to their live habitat, they can be divided relatively into pelagic and benthic fish.2023 April 4, Shuang-Lin Dong, Xiang-Li Tian, Qin-Feng Gao, Yun-Wei Dong, Aquaculture Ecology, Springer Nature, →ISBN, page 342
  2. Of or pertaining to oceans.
    • Drifting idly around a broad oceanic arc, the bottle collides softly with tens of thousands of pelagic plastics all colonized by hard-shelled organisms, including barnacles, coralline algae, foraminifera and bivalve molluscs.2020, David Farrier, “The Bottle as Hero”, in Footprints, 4th Estate, →ISBN

Noun

pelagic (plural pelagics)

  1. Any organism that lives in the open sea rather than in coastal or inland waters.

pelagic meaning in Tamil and Kannada

pelagic in Tamil

கடற்பரப்புக்குரிய, கடலின உயிரிகள், கடல்சார்

pelagic in Kannada

ಕಡಲಿನ

Examples of pelagic in a sentence

  • Wakasagi are pelagic plankton feeders found in open lakes, streams and reservoirs.
  • All or most were pelagic, ranging from planktic serpenticones and spherocones to mobile discocones and oxycones.
  • The young tend to occupy a pelagic habitat, but shift to a more demersal lifestyle with maturity.

All 15 example sentences with pelagic

Forms of pelagic

Adjective
comparativemore pelagic
superlativemost pelagic
Noun
pluralpelagics

Origin of pelagic

From Latin pelagicus (and possibly pelagus); from Ancient Greek πελαγικός (pelagikós), from πέλαγος (pélagos, “sea”). By surface analysis, -pelag + -ic.

Words formed from pelagic

Phrases with pelagic

Words that rhyme with pelagic

Questions about pelagic

What does pelagic mean?
Pelagic means living in the open sea rather than in coastal or inland waters.
What is pelagic in Tamil?
Pelagic in Tamil is கடற்பரப்புக்குரிய, கடலின உயிரிகள், கடல்சார். See Pelagic meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is pelagic?
Pelagic can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce pelagic?
Pelagic is pronounced /pəˈlæd͡ʒɪk/.

Words near pelagic in the dictionary

  1. Pelagianizing
  2. Pelagians
  3. pelagiarian
  4. pelagibacter
  5. pelagibacters
  6. pelagic
  7. pelagic trawl
  8. pelagic trawls
  9. pelagic zone
  10. pelagic zones
  11. pelagically

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pelagic (page history and authors); pelagic (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); pelagic (Kannada Wiktionary) (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-pelagic.wav.

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