fishes

1. 1
   noun

   Several distinct kinds or species of fish, considered together as a group.

   Like 'wines' meaning grape varieties rather than individual bottles.

   The coral reef supports hundreds of fishes, from tiny gobies to large groupers.

   Biologists catalogued the freshwater fishes of the entire river basin.

   Note

   The plural to reach for when variety is the point: a reef's fishes are its many species, not its head count. It sits naturally in ecology and natural history, beside words like freshwater, reef or deep-sea, while a catch of individuals is ordinarily just fish. Radiohead's "Weird Fishes" (2007) shows the form carrying a strangeness of its own, distinct from the older head-count plural.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of fish.

   He fishes the river below the falls each spring.

   The whole village fishes these waters for cod.

   Note

   The verb form is spelled exactly like the noun plural, and context settles which is which: an angler fishes, while a reef has fishes. It works with or without an object (he fishes the river, he fishes from the lake) and stretches to any searching or coaxing, as when someone fishes in a drawer. In cricket, a batsman who fishes reaches at a ball outside off stump and misses.

3. 3
   nounarchaic

   Two or more individual fish, counted as separate creatures rather than as one group.

   The fisherman laid out his fishes on the shore to dry in the sun.

   "The evil is for those benighted ones who will have none of it; seeing the light the true believers worship, as the fishes see the stars, but dimly."

   1886, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure

   Note

   Counting fish one by one with -es is the older habit. The King James Bible of 1611 has "five loaves, and two fishes," and H. Rider Haggard's She (1886–87) still writes of how "the fishes see the stars." Today it sounds either biblical or childlike, as in "I caught six fishes!" In neutral prose, count individuals as fish and keep fishes for the plural of kinds.

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