Word.ws English Dictionary

porcupine fish

porcupine fish noun: any of several tropical fish species in the family Diodontidae that are covered with sharp spines and inflate themselves when threatened.

porcupine fish: any of several tropical fish species in the family Diodontidae that are covered with sharp spines...
Image: Fernando Losada Rodríguez, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

porcupine fish (plural porcupine fish or porcupine fishes)

  1. Any of several tropical fish species in the family Diodontidae that are covered with sharp spines and inflate themselves when threatened.
    • I took a knife down from where it hung on the side of the fireplace, & place the sharp tip against the taut body of the porcupine fish.2001, Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish, Vintage, published 2016, page 161
    Synonyms:
    sea porcupine

Synonyms of porcupine fish

Forms of porcupine fish

pluralporcupine fish
pluralporcupine fishes
alternative formporcupine-fish
alternative formporcupinefish

Questions about porcupine fish

What does porcupine fish mean?
Porcupine fish means any of several tropical fish species in the family Diodontidae that are covered with sharp spines and inflate themselves when threatened.
What part of speech is porcupine fish?
Porcupine fish is a noun.
What is the plural of porcupine fish?
The plural of porcupine fish is porcupine fish.

Words near porcupine fish in the dictionary

  1. porcupine anole
  2. porcupine anoles
  3. porcupine crab
  4. porcupine crabs
  5. Porcupine Creek
  6. porcupine fish
  7. porcupine fishes
  8. porcupine flower
  9. porcupine grass
  10. porcupine grasses
  11. porcupine puffer

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: porcupine fish (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: “porcupine fish.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/porcupine_fish. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.