fishwife
Americannoun
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a woman who sells fish.
-
a coarse-mannered, vulgar-tongued woman.
noun
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a woman who sells fish
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a coarse scolding woman
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of fishwife
First recorded in 1375–1425, fishwife is from the late Middle English word fisshwyf. See fish, wife
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:
If the history of the hoax is an ancient and labyrinthine city, then Young has explored every alleyway, gossiped with every fishwife, drunk in every bar in town.
From Slate ● Nov. 30, 2017
"Big Lil" was a fishwife, and her husband, father and son all worked on the trawlers.
From BBC ● Oct. 25, 2017
A Canadian waitress who swears like a fishwife goes on holiday to Boracay.
From New York Times ● Jun. 1, 2016
In Part 2, we turn to the story of glamorous and inaccessible Mathilde—who, we learn, was born in France, as Aurélie, her mother a fishwife in Nantes, her father a stonemason.
From The New Yorker ● Nov. 2, 2015
Do they not hear me hollering over the fence at my sons every day in the habitual, maternal accents of a native-born fishwife?
From "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver
Alloa-born artist David Allan created drawings of ordinary people going about their daily lives in Edinburgh, including soldiers, coalmen, fishwives, sedan chair porters, firemen and officers of the city guard.
From BBC ● Nov. 18, 2021
In Sutcliffe’s sepia-toned prints, Whitby appears misty, moody and — if you replace the somberly dressed fishwives with tourists — almost identical to today.
From New York Times ● Sep. 8, 2015
But that was the Ryan Women: fishwives to the marrow, they were always ready to fight and knew the places that would cut deepest.
From The Guardian ● Nov. 9, 2012
Cuba was most distressing: the Kennedy Administration and the Cuban exiles it had praised and supported were now fighting like fishwives.
From Time Magazine Archive
The captains and commanders aigued over the maps like fishwives over a bucket of crabs.
From "A Dance with Dragons" by George R. R. Martin
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.
