Dogfish

noun

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Any of various small sharks

    "Off the United States, the National Marine Fisheries Service is helping industry explore fisheries for deep shrimp, rattails, chimeras, orange roughy, smoothheads, slackjaw eels, blue hake, skates and dogfish, which the National Fisheries Institute, an industry group, in an effort to improve their marketability, has renamed cape shark."

  2. 2
    any of several small sharks wordnet
  3. 3
    Any of various small sharks; Especially those from the family Squalidae
  4. 4
    primitive long-bodied carnivorous freshwater fish with a very long dorsal fin; found in sluggish waters of North America wordnet
  5. 5
    Any of various small sharks; A catshark, any shark from family Scyliorhinidae
Show 10 more definitions
  1. 6
    Any of various small sharks; A kitefin shark, any shark from family Dalatiidae
  2. 7
    Any of various small sharks; Scyliorhinus canicula or Scyliorhinus stellaris UK
  3. 8
    Any of various small sharks; Scyliorhinus canicula
  4. 9
    Any of various small sharks; Squalus suckleyi Canada
  5. 10
    Any of various small sharks; Mustelus canis
  6. 11
    Any of various small sharks; Bodianus rufus Barbados
  7. 12
    Any of various small sharks; Ginglymostoma cirratum or Mustelus canis Guyana
  8. 13
    Any of various small sharks; Ginglymostoma cirratum Trinidad-and-Tobago
  9. 14
    Any of various small sharks; Squalus acanthias, Squalus blainville, Squalus megalops, or Squalus mitsukurii Namibia
  10. 15
    The bowfin, Amia calva. US

    "Bowfins, sometimes called Dog-fish, live in sluggish waters throughout eastern N.A."

Etymology

From dog + fish. Compare Greek σκυλόψαρο (skylópsaro, “dogfish”), Latin canicula (“dogfish”, literally “little dog”), Italian pescecane (“dogfish”), French chien de mer (literally “dog of the sea”), German Meerhund (literally “seadog”) and Hundfisch (“dogfish”), and English seadog. For non-Indo-European cognates, see Maltese kelb il-baħar (literally “dog of the sea”) and Turkish köpek balığı (“shark”), likely calques from Indo-European languages.

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