Word.ws English Dictionary

phishing

/ˈfɪʃɪŋ/

phishing noun: the malicious act of keeping a false website or sending a false e-mail with the intent of masquerading as a trustworthy entity in order to acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details. Also the present participle and gerund of phish.

Noun

phishing (uncountable)

  1. The malicious act of keeping a false website or sending a false e-mail with the intent of masquerading as a trustworthy entity in order to acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details.
    • Holonym: social engineering
    • A growing number of U.S. cities are alerting residents to a widespread phishing scam involving fraudulent text messages about unpaid parking violations.2025 March 11, Sunny Yadav, “US Cities Warn of Surge in Unpaid Parking Phishing Text Scams”, in eSecurity Planet
  2. The act of circumventing security with an alias.

Also used as

phishing is also the present participle and gerund of phish.

phishing meaning in Indonesian and Persian

phishing in Indonesian

malicious act
pengelabuan

phishing in Persian

malicious act
فیشینگ fišing

Origin of phishing

Respelling of fishing (“trying to find”). In Usenet newsgroups, cracker and pirate groups used variant spellings of phish and warez (i.e. wares) to evade scans and filters by mainstream servers policing the ARPAnet/Internet. Compare other respelling slang like phat and phreak.

Words formed from phishing

Phrases with phishing

Words that rhyme with phishing

Questions about phishing

What does phishing mean?
Phishing means the malicious act of keeping a false website or sending a false e-mail with the intent of masquerading as a trustworthy entity in order to acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details.
What is phishing in Indonesian?
Phishing in Indonesian is pengelabuan. See Phishing meaning in Indonesian.
What part of speech is phishing?
Phishing is a noun.
How do you pronounce phishing?
Phishing is pronounced /ˈfɪʃɪŋ/.

Words near phishing in the dictionary

  1. phishermen
  2. phishers
  3. phishes
  4. Phishhead
  5. Phishheads
  6. phishing
  7. phisically
  8. phisick
  9. phisicke
  10. phisickes
  11. phisicks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: phishing (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)-Persent101-phishing.wav.

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