Word.ws English Dictionary

spearfishing

spearfishing noun: a form of fishing in which the fisherman attempts to impale the fish upon a spear, which may be thrust or thrown by hand or with a spear gun.

Noun

spearfishing (uncountable)

  1. A form of fishing in which the fisherman attempts to impale the fish upon a spear, which may be thrust or thrown by hand or with a spear gun.
    • Today, Riffe International makes all of its spearfishing equipment a few miles down the road in San Clemente.2020 July 14, Tom Mashberg, “Jay Riffe, Spearfishing King, Is Dead at 82”, in The New York Times

Origin of spearfishing

From spear + fishing.

Words formed from spearfishing

Questions about spearfishing

What does spearfishing mean?
Spearfishing means a form of fishing in which the fisherman attempts to impale the fish upon a spear, which may be thrust or thrown by hand or with a spear gun.
What part of speech is spearfishing?
Spearfishing is a noun.

Words near spearfishing in the dictionary

  1. spearfishers
  2. spearfisherwoman
  3. spearfisherwomen
  4. spearfishery
  5. spearfishes
  6. spearfishing
  7. speargrass
  8. speargrasses
  9. speargun
  10. spearguns
  11. spearhead

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spearfishing (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)-Flame, not lame-spearfishing.wav.

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