fishy wishy
Fishy wishy is a childish or affectionately playful British term for a fish — typically used when speaking to very young children or when adults adopt a deliberately infantile register for comic effect.
Definitions
Fishy wishy is a childish or affectionately playful British term for a fish — typically used when speaking to very young children or when adults adopt a deliberately infantile register for comic effect. It follows the classic nursery vocabulary pattern of reduplication with phonetic variation ('itsy bitsy,' 'walky talky'), softening ordinary words into baby-talk forms. The term is inoffensive, gentle, and entirely domestic in register; you might say it to a toddler at an aquarium.
Look at the fishy wishy in the pond, she told her daughter, pointing at the goldfish circling beneath the surface.
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(UK, childish, or, endearing) A fish.
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🇬🇧About British & Irish slang slang
UK and Irish slang — Cockney, Scouse, Geordie, Yorkshire, Glaswegian, Brummie, Welsh, West Country, plus Irish English. Centuries of regional dialects feeding into modern British and Irish street talk.
See all British & Irish slang slang on Slangora.
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Semantically related
- fishy67%
(LGBTQ, _, slang) Of a drag queen or a trans woman: appearing very feminine and resembling a cisgender woman.
- fishy65%
Of, from, or similar to fish.
- kiddy widdy64%
A puerile or affectionate British English term for a young child — the kind of word a parent or grandparent would use in a cooing, baby-talk kind of way. It's formed by rhyming reduplication, the same process that gives us 'itsy-bitsy' or 'teeny-weeny.' In modern use it's mostly ironic — adults calling each other 'kiddy widdies' when someone acts immature or gets overly sensitive about something trivial.
- fishy64%
(figurative) Suspicious; inspiring doubt.