# Is "fish" countable?



## richardliu

Hi all,    I was told that the word "fish" is countable when we talk about its categories. For example,"many kinds of fishes". Is this true for your native ears? If yes, then should I say"this kind of fish" or "this kind of fishes"? Many thanks  advance!


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## Copyright

Fishes is apparently the older of the two forms for the singular (and now also plural) fish. 

Here's what the _Concise Oxford_ has to say: The normal plural of fish is *fish *(a shoal of fish; he caught two huge fish). The older form *fishes *is still used when referring to different kinds of fish (freshwater fishes of the British Isles).

I don't have an American dictionary at hand right now to see what it says, but I think I recall similar usage in American English.


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## ruru-h

Perhaps in formal english it is acceptable, but it is not readily said in conversation.


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## sound shift

You should say "This kind of fish". The reason is the fact that "kind" is singular, and nothing to do with the countability or uncountability of "fish", just as  we say "this kind of car" (countable) and "this kind of information" (uncountable).

Some "sources" say that "fishes" is the plural of "fish" but I say "two fish".


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## sdgraham

ruru-h said:


> Perhaps in formal english it is acceptable, but it is not readily said in conversation.



Actually, an organization called Loaves and Fishes is widespread and is organized to feed the hungry in the manner described in the Christian New Testament. That's still not general use of the fishy plural, however.

By the way,* English* is capitalized.


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

richardliu said:


> Hi all, I was told that the word "fish" is countable when we talk about its categories. For example,"many kinds of fishes". Is this true for your native ears? If yes, then should I say"this kind of fish" or "this kind of fishes"? Many thanks advance!


 

Around here the plural of "fish" is "fish" with a null plural marker.  Unlike other 'mass' nouns, fish does not become plural when making general statements.  

Example:

I like tea (specific to general)>I love the teas of the world

I love to eat brown rice (specific>to general)>I love all the rices of the world (all the kinds of rice).  

Where is the sugar>Which sugars do you like (there are various kinds of sugar).  

But:

I love fish>I love (to eat) all the (kinds of) fish in the world.  

You might be able to use:

Where is the fish>Which fishes do you like (there are various kinds of fish(es)).


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## Bigote Blanco

He fishes many of the lakes in the area and has become quite an expert.


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

Bigote Blanco said:


> He fishes many of the lakes in the area and has become quite an expert.


 
That's a verb not the noun...


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## GreenWhiteBlue

I would agree with copyright: _fish_ would be the plural used for individual, while_ fishes_ would be the plural used for species.

Suppose in my aquarium I have two minnows, five sharks, and four eels. I could say "There are *eleven fish* _(= 11 individual animals)_ in my aquarium", but I might also say "of the *three fishes* _(= 3 different species, each of which is a kind of fish)_ in my aquarium, the minnows are the most dangerous."

Note, by the way, that even though the singular and the plural are the same when speaking of individuals, the word "fish" can be entirely countable.  One may speak of "one fish" or "two fish" or "one hundred and fifty-three fish".  The same is true of other words that have plurals identical to the singular: we can say _five sheep_, or _six moose_, and so _sheep _and _moose _are clearly countable.


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## Alxmrphi

I think it's also partly down to not knowing..
I remember some TV show was on about a month ago late at night (I woke up and it was on) and it was a fishing club in America and he kept saying "fishes" in the normal plural (_not the 'different categories' that have already been mentioned here_) and I remember it annoyed me a bit...

That's what happens with our language, a rule gets taken and applied to something else, as we grow older we (most of us) memorise the exceptions but some people don't. That's why I think many people will hear 'fishes' used when it should be 'fish'.



> Around here the plural of "fish" is "fish" with a null plural marker


What's a null plural marker? It seems to be contradictory, I'd call this a zero plural, like *sheep *and *shrimp*. The idea of having a 'marker' that was actually 'nothing' doesn't seem logical to me! 

[Edit:] GreenWhiteBlue brings up a good point, people commonly call zero plurals 'uncountable' when uncountable actually is used for words like 'bread' (you can't have _3 bread_, but you can have _six sheep_ etc)


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## natkretep

sdgraham said:


> Actually, an organization called Loaves and Fishes is widespread and is organized to feed the hungry in the manner described in the Christian New Testament. That's still not general use of the fishy plural, however.



This is to do with the fact that in the King James (Authorised) Version of the Bible (1611), you read of the miracle of the 'five loaves and two fishes' (Mark 6:41). A modern translation, such as the New International Version, says 'five loaves and two fish'.


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## Copyright

natkretep said:


> This is to do with the fact that in the King James (Authorised) Version of the Bible (1611), you read of the miracle of the 'five loaves and two fishes' (Mark 6:41). A modern translation, such as the New International Version, says 'five loaves and two fish'.



Thank you for that interesting fact.


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## richardliu

I was moved by all your replies and gained a lot !Thanks again.


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## pickarooney

Alxmrphi said:


> [Edit:] GreenWhiteBlue brings up a good point, people commonly call zero plurals 'uncountable' when uncountable actually is used for words like 'bread' (you can't have _3 bread_, but you can have _six sheep_ etc)



You can have three _breads _though - 

"To accompany the dish, there is a choice of three breads - naan, pita and chapati."

I know many people would prefer 'types of bread' in all cases, but there's nothing intrinsically wrong with pluralising 'bread'. 

As for 'fishes', I wouldn't often use it myself (outside of the verb form or a reference to the biblical miracle) but don't find it shocking. I wonder are there dialects where it's still the standard plural.


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## twins1

Which one do you prefer?

There are two fish in my aquarium. 
There are two fishes in my aquarium. 


 Note: They are from the same species.


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## Barque

I'd say _fish_.

You might want to take a look at this: http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/fish-or-fishes.2311368/


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## twins1

Barque, thank you.


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## e2efour

My preference is also for _fish_. I don't regard the number of species as relevant.

There is an idiom _There are plenty of other fish in the sea_. Here I would find it very odd to say _fishes_.


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## George French

e2efour said:


> My preference is also for _fish_. I don't regard the number of species as relevant.
> 
> There is an idiom _There are plenty of other fish in the sea_. Here I would find it very odd to say _fishes_.


 
It may be interesting to look at the WR dictionary at http://www.wordreference.com/definition/fish :-
"any of a large group of cold-blooded aquatic vertebrates having jaws, gills, and usually fins and a skin covered in scales:
includes the sharks and rays (class _Chondrichthyes_: *cartilaginous fishes*)
and the teleosts, lungfish, etc (class _Osteichthyes_: *bony fishes*)"​ 
Reading a dictionary is a very simple way of getting good info., in most cases.. One still has to remember and to think though.

GF..

At least most of us seem to agree that using the fishes should not be used, but often only be fish.


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## Fishwife

e2efour said:


> There is an idiom _There are plenty of other fish in the sea_. Here I would find it very odd to say _fishes_.


I find it odd when I see a familiar proverb altered in any way (such as "lots of fish in the ocean").

In your example I would not find the use of "fishes" very odd, but I do find "fish" to be much more common.  Could "fishes" be declining in use?  I am not sure when I last saw it used outside of older phrases ("cartilaginous fishes," "sleeping with the fishes," "five loaves and two small fishes").


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## The Newt

The ordinary plural of "fish" is "fish." "Fishes" is used in scientific and other contexts where the reference is to various fish _species._


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## Mahantongo

The Newt said:


> The ordinary plural of "fish" is "fish." "Fishes" is used in scientific and other contexts where the reference is to various fish _species._


 
"Fishes" is used consistently throughout the 1611 Authorized Version/King James Version of the Bible as the plural of "fish", and so you will also find "fishes" used in references to Bible stories (such as "loaves and fishes"), or when used in set phrases that echo Biblical phrases (such as "all the fishes of the sea.")


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## sdgraham

Note that this fish story has been nicely covered in a previous thread: Is "fish" countable?


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## JustKate

Twins1, I have merged your question and the answers it received to one of the previous threads on this topic. (Thanks, SDG.) If your question still isn't answered, you're welcome to add additional questions to this thread.

JustKate
English Only moderator


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## NevenaT

What's interesting is that I've never heard anyone using 'meat' in the same way.
Can you say 'he bought 3 meats' and by that mean 3 types of meat, but 5 pieces.
Or as with fish: 'I ate 2 fish-I ate two meat'?
It seems this only happens with fish and sheep, there're probably more examples I can't remember. 
What's your opinion on 'three meats here are lamb, pork and beef'?


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## PaulQ

NevenaT said:


> Can you say 'he bought 3 meats' and by that mean 3 types of meat, but *3* pieces.


No.


NevenaT said:


> Or as with fish: 'I ate 2 fish-I ate two meat'?


No.


NevenaT said:


> What's your opinion on *of* '*The*1 three meats here are lamb, pork and beef'?


It is correct but the person would usually say "The *three types of meat* here..."

1 It is unclear what you are trying to say - you either need to capitalise *Three *or add *The*.


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## NevenaT

Ok, I've never heard anyone saying 'I bought 3 meats', but it's funny how it happens to the noun fish and not to meat. (when referring to types of course)
Sorry about that, I sometimes drop an article if I'm not paying attention because my first language doesn't have articles at all. It used to be a real struggle when I started learning English, it still is actually because there're so many nuances, but at least I'm getting better.
I wandered off now...
My question is, why would we capitalise Three and not use an article in that case, what does that have to do with the meaning?


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## Copyright

NevenaT said:


> My question is, why would we capitalise Three and not use an article in that case, what does that have to do with the meaning?


It would help to have the full sentence and context ... as usual.


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## NevenaT

'He bought Three fishes.' - this doesn't look right.
'Three fishes he bought are salmon, mackerel and sardines.' - it still seems to me that 'the' is necessary.
NB these are two separate sentences, don't look at them as part of the same context.


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## PaulQ

PaulQ said:


> 1 It is unclear what you are trying to say - you either need to capitalise *Three *or add *The*.





NevenaT said:


> My question is, why would we capitalise Three and not use an article in that case, what does that have to do with the meaning?


You put the words in quotes as if it were direct speech and the first part of a sentence.

"Three meats here are XY & Z" = "There are many meats here but these three are XY & Z."
"The three meats here are XY & Z" = "There are three meats and they are XY & Z."

That said:
meats 
types of meat


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## RedwoodGrove

"If fishes were wishes we'd all be kings."

Whatever they said in the old days, nowadays we say "types of fish" or "kinds of meat", etc. in AE.


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## Myridon

NevenaT said:


> 'Three fishes he bought are salmon, mackerel and sardines.' - it still seems to me that 'the' is necessary.


Three fishes he bought are salmon, mackerel and sardines. He also bought sole, flounder, and tuna.
The three fishes he bought are salmon, mackerel and sardines. He didn't buy any other fishes.


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## Andygc

RedwoodGrove said:


> Whatever they said in the old days, nowadays we say "types of fish" or "kinds of meat", etc. in AE.


There are over 2,000 examples of "fishes" as a noun in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Although the corpus search does throw up a few examples of the verb erroneously labelled as nouns). The smaller British National Corpus has 169 examples.

For "meats" COCA has 2,348 examples and the BNC has 172.
AE examples:





> I'm usually elbow-deep into one or another of the East Coast's pelagic fishes.
> habitat-specialist reef fishes have been unique in demonstrating how this inheritance convention is maintained
> All those meats at the barbecue festival had me salivating,
> the device can also steam cook and even sear meats to keep the moisture inside


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## RedwoodGrove

I can't help it if all those people are wrong.


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## NevenaT

OK, thanks everyone. The point is that it's easier to avoid it and also more common to say "x types of". However, I do want to know everything because I'm quite detail-oriented (though you wouldn't say that by looking at how I use quotation marks).
Anyway, an example such as "He bought three fishes at the market yesterday. -Which fishes did he buy. The three fishes he bought were salmon, mackerel and tuna."
"Sole is a fish/a type of fish."
 Of course this example is far from natural speech because of the repetition of fish, but I wanted to demonstrate using the zero, indefinite and definite article with the noun "fish" as countable.


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## RedwoodGrove

I think you are coming up against the boundaries of language and discovering that any language is imperfect. Goethe supposedly said something about this when he was dying (not cloth but mortally).


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## velisarius

We don't normally talk about buying three "fishes" in the English of today.

_He bought three fish: a salmon, a mackerel and a tuna.
_
In  a children's song you may hear about "five little fishes (or fishies)", but the version I sing to my grandkids has "five little fish went out one day...".


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## NevenaT

And I guess you used the indefinite article in front of the nouns to actually refer to an entire fish. Talking about salmon, mackerel etc, I'd suppose they can be both countable and uncountable.


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## Myridon

velisarius said:


> We don't normally talk about buying three "fishes" in the English of today.
> 
> _He bought three fish: a salmon, a mackerel and a tuna._


This is also a correct sentence for people who use "fishes".  He bought three fish and he bought three fishes.
The different sentence is:
He bought eight salmon, four mackerel, and three tuna.  He bought three fishes but he bought fifteen fish.

The "we" who don't normally say this doesn't include ichthyologists, aquarium hobbyists, etc for whom this is "normal" talk.


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## NevenaT

So it should always be some "scientific" context, so to say, there shouldn' be fishes on the dinner table!


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## GreenWhiteBlue

NevenaT said:


> And I guess you used the indefinite article in front of the nouns to actuallu refer to an entire fish. Talking about salmon, mackerel etc, I'd suppose they can be both countable and uncountable.



The word "fish" is uncountable only when you use it to refer to the flesh of fish used as food, in the same way that "meat" would be used to refer to the flesh of warm-blooded animals:
_We always eat fish on Fridays.
John is allergic to both meat and fish.
_
When "fish" is used to mean a creature that swims in the sea, it is always countable.  The question with "fish" used that way is not one of countable versus uncountable, but of the correct plural form.  In some cases, the plural "fishes" may be used, and in other cases the irregular, unchanging, zero-inflection plural "fish" may be used -- but in both cases, the word is perfectly countable.  One may of course speak of "three fish", in exactly the same way one may speak of three sheep, or three deer -- and the fact that one may count them proves rather substantially that "fish" is *countable.  *We therefore need to be more careful in this thread regarding what it is we are actually discussing.


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## NevenaT

The dictionaries say that in the example "3 fish" the noun is uncountable. The noun is uncountable, but the fish (creatures) are countable. In my native language there's something called grammatical and natural plural and it pretty much explains the example "4 fish" as being grammatically uncountable, but naturally countable. Maybe naturally is not the best word, but you get the point.
The saying goes "there's a lot of other fish in the sea" and if what you're saying about it always being countable when referring to swimming creatures is true, I wouldn't like to swim in that sea, must be quite smelly. And if understood you well, there are examples when people say many fish and refer to the living fish(es). Anyway, I knew about it meaning "kinds of fish", but didn't know it's not idiomatic (any more at least) to say there are different fishes at the market place.


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## velisarius

Myridon said:


> The "we" who don't normally say this doesn't include ichthyologists, aquarium hobbyists, etc for whom this is "normal" talk.



 I was talking about the given context of buying fish in the market. I don't think I've ever heard people talk about buying "fishes". I think I mean that I wouldn't teach that usage for an everyday context.


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

(to eat) "What is your favorite fish?" - "Trout."
"What are your favorite fishes?" - "Trout, salmon, and sole."
(to keep) "What is your favorite fish? - 'Koi carp."
"What are your favorite fish?" - "Koi carp, tetras, and swordtails." 

"What do you call a fish without an eye?" - "Fsh."


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## NevenaT

You mean vice versa?


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

No, but that's only how I see it. Others may differ.


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## GreenWhiteBlue

NevenaT said:


> The dictionaries say that in the example "3 fish" the noun is uncountable.


What "dictionaries" say that?  (Yes, I am asking for a citation, and preferably a link.)  Beyond that, how could it say that something that was clearly being *counted* is "uncountable"?

I think you are confusing uncountable nouns (such as gold, wheat, water, and the like) with countable nouns whose irregular plurals are the same as the singular (such as sheep, deer, moose, and fish).


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

GreenWhiteBlue said:


> I think you are confusing uncountable nouns (such as gold, wheat, water, and the like) with countable nouns whose irregular plurals are the same as the singular (such as sheep, deer, moose, and fish).



I agree. And, for some reason, this is the case for many different species of fish. "The xxxx are running." "xxxx are plentiful in these waters.", 'xxxx' being the same form as in the singular, no '-s/-es/-ies'.


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## Rover_KE

Always use _fish_ as the plural. On the rare occasions when _fishes_ might be considered preferable by some people, _fish_ will not be wrong.


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## Andygc

There is no "always". "Fish" will be wrong if you are an ichthyologist writing a scientific paper about fishes. But in general conversation "fish" will not be wrong.


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## NevenaT

@GreenWhiteBlue  I didn't say that was the exact same phrase they used in a dictionary, but look it up in any dictionary and you'll see that it's usually "fishes" and not "fish" that they have as the examples for "kinds of fish" in scientific, biological terms. Sorry, I was maybe too exclusive, certainly there're some examples, though fewer, when they use the form "fish" in plural as a countable noun with this meaning.
When we talk about food, it's always fish. Though "4 fish" will always baffle me.
fish | Definition of fish in English by Oxford Dictionaries
We were discussing fish and fishes so much today, I ended up in a supermarket buying trout.
By the way, now I see in the Cambridge Dictionary that even terms for fish species behave like the word "fish".
"Thousands of young salmon and trout have been killed by pollution."
But if we want to say different species of trout, we can say, but don't have to "trouts".


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## GreenWhiteBlue

NevenaT said:


> @GreenWhiteBlue  I didn't say that was the exact same phrase they used in a dictionary, but look it up in any dictionary and you'll see that it's usually "fishes" and not "fish" that they have as the examples for "kinds of fish" in scientific, biological terms.


You are still missing the point.  The dictionary is telling you what the plural form may be, but it is saying nothing about whether or not the noun is uncountable.  As I suspected, you are confusing two very different concepts.



> Though "4 fish" will always baffle me.


You are baffled because you have not understood the difference between an uncountable noun, and a countable noun with an irregular plural.


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## NevenaT

All right now I understand, I was totally not paying attention to the "irregular plural" part, it has nothing to do with countability, so that phenomenon exists in other languages too, now I get it. Deer and sheep are irregular plural as well.
What about a collective noun such as cattle, would that be irregular plural? I've read that in AE speakers are more likely to use it with verbs in sg, and in BrE it's vice versa. But both are possible and depend on context of course.
Thanks for patience!


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