hairtail

British

/ ˈhɛəˌteɪl /

noun

Usual US name: cutlass fish. any marine spiny-finned fish of the family Trichiuridae, most common in warm seas, having a long whiplike scaleless body and long sharp teeth

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

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.

Others have taken to fishing over the side of their tankers, catching tuna, squid and largehead hairtail to cook.

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 5, 2026

A few years ago, Mr Kim began to notice that the popular silvery hairtail fish he relied on were disappearing from local waters, and his earnings plunged by half.

From BBC • Oct. 23, 2025

Around the same time, the General Administration of Customs immediately suspended the import of citrus fruit, along with frozen horse mackerel and chilled white striped hairtail.

From New York Times • Aug. 3, 2022

The two types of banned fish — horse mackerel and white striped hairtail — are not among its top 10 exported fish species.

From New York Times • Aug. 3, 2022

This spring, he handed the chef’s position over to Ken Hosoki, who was carving delicate sheets of rarely seen species like hairtail when I arrived while another chef rubbed a wasabi root on sharkskin.

From New York Times • Aug. 12, 2014

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023