wooden fish

wooden fish noun: a wooden percussion instrument played by monks and lay people in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition in China, Japan, Korea and other East Asian countries.

Image: Patrick Weemeeuw, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

wooden fish (plural wooden fishes or wooden fish)

A wooden percussion instrument played by monks and lay people in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition in China, Japan, Korea and other East Asian countries.

wooden fish meaning in Indonesian, Thai and Vietnamese

wooden fish in Indonesian

percussion instrument: ikan kayu, muyu, blok kuil Tionghoa

wooden fish in Thai

percussion instrument: ปลาไม้, มู่-ยฺหวี

wooden fish in Vietnamese

percussion instrument: mõ, mộc ngư

Forms of wooden fish

plural	wooden fishes
plural	wooden fish

Origin of wooden fish

Calque from Chinese 木魚／木鱼 (mùyú).

Questions about wooden fish

What does wooden fish mean?: Wooden fish means a wooden percussion instrument played by monks and lay people in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition in China, Japan, Korea and other East Asian countries.
What is wooden fish in Indonesian?: Wooden fish in Indonesian is ikan kayu, muyu, blok kuil Tionghoa. See Wooden fish meaning in Indonesian.
What part of speech is wooden fish?: Wooden fish is a noun.
What is the plural of wooden fish?: The plural of wooden fish is wooden fishes.

Words near wooden fish in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: wooden 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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-wooden fish.wav.

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