Word.ws English Dictionary

sleep with the fishes

sleep with the fishes verb: to be dead, with one's corpse disposed of in a body of water.

Verb

sleep with the fishes (third-person singular simple present sleeps with the fishes, present participle sleeping with the fishes, simple past and past participle slept with the fishes)

  1. (idiomatic) To be dead, with one's corpse disposed of in a body of water.
    • The porter […] opened his sack, and pitched the corpse into the river, and ran back to receive the rest of his pay “ It is done,” said he, laughing ; “ Your man sleeps with the fishes of the Tigris by this time […]”1833 March, “The Three Humpbacks ; or, the Bridge of Bagdad”, in The Lady's Magazine and Museum, page 105

Forms of sleep with the fishes

third-person singular presentsleeps with the fishes
present participlesleeping with the fishes
past participleslept with the fishes
pastslept with the fishes

Origin of sleep with the fishes

The idea of sleeping with fishes first appears in Homer's Iliad (21), in which Achilles threatens (and kills) Lycaon (son of Priam), who will 'sleep with the fishes', in some translations. There was emphasis on the brutality of this method because it meant the body would remain forever unburied akin to an animal (fish). The earliest known exact phrase is from 1833, see the quotation below. The phrase was popularized in the motion picture The Godfather (1972). The 1969 book on which the movie was based includes a large, dead fish wrapped in a bulletproof vest being used to signify that a character is "sleeping on the bottom of the ocean", but not the phrase.

Questions about sleep with the fishes

What does sleep with the fishes mean?
Sleep with the fishes means to be dead, with one's corpse disposed of in a body of water.
What part of speech is sleep with the fishes?
Sleep with the fishes is a verb.
What is the past tense of sleep with the fishes?
The past tense of sleep with the fishes is slept with the fishes.

Words near sleep with the fishes in the dictionary

  1. sleep under the same bridge
  2. sleep well
  3. sleep with
  4. sleep with one eye open
  5. sleep with one's fathers
  6. sleep with the fishes
  7. sleep-at-noon
  8. sleep-ate
  9. sleep-deprived
  10. sleep-drunk
  11. sleep-eat

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sleep with the fishes (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-sleep with the fishes.ogg.

Cite this entry: “sleep with the fishes.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sleep_with_the_fishes. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.