fishy
Americanadjective
-
fishier,
comparative
-
fishiest
superlative
adjective
-
of, involving, or suggestive of fish
-
abounding in fish
-
informal suspicious, doubtful, or questionable
their leaving at the same time looked fishy
-
dull and lifeless
a fishy look
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Adjectives
Etymology
Origin of fishy
Explanation
Anything fishy smells, tastes, or resembles a fish in some way. Suspicious people and situations are also called fishy. Since this word has two meanings, context is key. If you say something is fishy, it probably means you think something is suspicious. If you’re sitting next to someone eating a tuna sandwich, though, you could just mean you smell a fishy odor. Fishy usually refers to situations that seem suspect or shady. A guy looking over your shoulder while you use an ATM is fishy. A student looking at her arm for answers during a test is fishy. Anything fishy is suspicious — somebody’s up to something.
Vocabulary lists containing fishy
The Watsons Go to Birmingham
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Strange
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Top Ten Relevant Words: Moby Dick, Chapters 1-16
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Marquis Brown always reports the job scams he encounters on LinkedIn and marks fishy emails for spam.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 5, 2026
At Hawksmoor, the delicate ribbons of Cantabrian anchovy undercut her previous bias against the fishy staple.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 31, 2026
"Whenever we find out that there's something dubious or fishy about a couple, we disqualify them," he tells the BBC.
From BBC ● Aug. 9, 2026
And you don’t have to be standing on the banks of the Kenai River to smell something fishy.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 12, 2026
Mom’s fish looked a little, well, fishy, as she picked at it with her fork.
From "Out of My Mind" by Sharon M. Draper
As soon as I arrived in Livingston Manor, a hamlet around 120 miles north of New York City, my life became notably fishier.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 5, 2026
Faced with some stiff competition, one savvy float-building team at this year’s Rose Parade still managed to reel in a Guinness World Record title by setting its sights on something decidedly fishier.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 3, 2026
That all makes sense on one level, but Angela Huffman, head of Farm Action—a nonprofit that campaigns against the corporatization of the food system—believes there’s something fishier going on.
From Slate ● Apr. 18, 2025
The kind from my coastal neck of the woods eats fishier things, and although I have never eaten one, I have eaten other seaside birds, and they can taste like low tide.
From Washington Post ● Sep. 23, 2021
Even fishier, according to the medical examiners, there was a two-hour gap between the estimated time of death and when the cop called it in.
From "Dear Martin" by Nic Stone
Mackerel is among the fishiest of fish, so I’m stoked by the clean flavor of the silvery specimen I encounter at Barrel & Crow.
From Washington Post ● Jun. 16, 2015
Indeed, one of the fishiest things about this entire story is that the Hoax of Hollywood conference lasted just one day.
From The Guardian ● Mar. 13, 2013
Baja, Calif. Baja and the Sea of Cortez, featuring Cabo San Lucas and the East Cape region, is perhaps the fishiest place on earth.
From Time Magazine Archive
I recently visited some great friends in the Florida Panhandle and got to hang out in Destin, one of the neatest harbors and fishiest towns on the coast.
From Time Magazine Archive
I never seen a pack o' fools look fishier; and you may lay to that, if I tells you that I looked the fishiest.
From Treasure Island by Milo Winter
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
