Word.ws English Dictionary

smell fishy

smell fishy verb: to seem suspicious.

Verb

smell fishy (third-person singular simple present smells fishy, present participle smelling fishy, simple past and past participle smelled fishy or smelt fishy)

  1. (idiomatic, informal) To seem suspicious.

Forms of smell fishy

third-person singular presentsmells fishy
present participlesmelling fishy
past participlesmelled fishy
pastsmelled fishy
past participlesmelt fishy
pastsmelt fishy

Questions about smell fishy

What does smell fishy mean?
Smell fishy means to seem suspicious.
What part of speech is smell fishy?
Smell fishy is a verb.
What is the past tense of smell fishy?
The past tense of smell fishy is smelled fishy.

Words near smell fishy in the dictionary

  1. smell a fox
  2. smell a rat
  3. smell blindness
  4. smell blood
  5. smell blood in the water
  6. smell fishy
  7. smell fox
  8. smell foxes
  9. smell like a rose
  10. smell like a tart's bedroom
  11. smell like a tart's boudoir

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: smell fishy (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: “smell fishy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/smell_fishy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.