wet fish

English

Noun

wet fish (uncountable)

1. Fresh fish intended to be cooked.
   • 1851, Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor‎^[1], volume 1, G. Woodfall and Son, page 68:

     [Plaice] is a difficult fish to manage, and in poor neighbourhoods an important one to manage well. The old hands make a profit out of it; new hands a loss. There’s not much cod or other wet fish sold to the poor, while plaice is in.

   • 2007, Virginia Ironside, review of You Cannot Live as I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This: The Thoroughly Disgraceful Life and Times of Willie Donaldson by Terence Blacker, Literary Review, April 2007, p. 39,

     Posing as [Henry] Root, a wildly right-wing wet-fish merchant, Donaldson wrote to a variety of political figures and celebrities […]

Usage notes

• Used especially in shops to distinguish it from fried fish, dried fish or salt fish.

Translations

fresh fish

• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 鮮魚／鲜鱼 (zh) (xiānyú)

• Dutch: please add this translation if you can
• Finnish: tuore kala
• German: Frischfisch m