Word.ws English Dictionary

tangfish

tangfish noun: a common or harbour seal (Phoca vitulina).

Noun

tangfish (plural not attested)

  1. (UK, dialectal, no plural) A common or harbour seal (Phoca vitulina).
    • The coasts of Shetland swarm with the smaller seals, or Tangfish, so named from being supposed to live among the Tang, or larger fuci that grow near the shore.1813-1831, Brewster, David (1781-1868), Second American Edition of the New Edinburgh Encyclopædia, New York: Samuel Whiting and John L. Tiffany [and others], page 128
    • a noted retreat of seals or selkies, or tangfish, as they are vernacularly called in Zetland1863, Sidney Hall, Guide to the Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland Including Orkney and Shetland, page 791

Origin of tangfish

tang (“seaweed”) + fish

Questions about tangfish

What does tangfish mean?
Tangfish means a common or harbour seal (Phoca vitulina).
What part of speech is tangfish?
Tangfish is a noun.

Words near tangfish in the dictionary

  1. tangeraxanthin
  2. tangeretin
  3. tangerine
  4. tangerines
  5. tangeritin
  6. tangfish
  7. Tanggal Sawang
  8. Tanggu
  9. Tanggula
  10. tanghan
  11. tanghans

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tangfish (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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