Kamis, 15 Juli 2021

'Fish' or 'Fishes'?

The noun "fish" has two different, completely acceptable plurals—"fish" and "fishes"—but "fish" is by far the most common plural. It's what you usually use to refer to a group or collection of fish. For example, if Squiggly brought home a big bag of goldfish from the pet store, Aardvark might ask, "Do you have a bowl for those fish? Do you have food for those fish? What were you thinking buying all those fish?" 

"Fishes" tends to be used in more specialized areas and in some well-known sayings.

Scientists use 'fishes'

For example, scientists who study fish (they're called "ichthyologists")— "Ichthys" is Greek for "fish" — often refer to different species as fishes. A quick Google Books search returns a bunch of scientific tomes talking about the different kinds of fishes that researchers have found in various regions, such as thirty kinds of fishes off the coast of California and 149 kinds of fishes in Minnesota

The majority of quotations using the word "fishes" in the Corpus of Contemporary American English are also from scientific publications, like this one from The Fisheries Blog at blogspot.com: "Some deep living fishes like the orange roughy don't reach maturity until nearly 30 and can live to 125 years." Those are some old fish!

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