Fish or Fishes?

What is the correct plural of “fish”? 

This is something which has been niggling away at me for a while now. Something which started to bother me when I began working as a dive instructor and which has become more relevant to me now that my son is learning to talk.

Maybe not the most vital topic of the 21^st century to be debated I’ll admit, but something happened recently which had been questioning my understanding of the English language.

Fish vs Fishes

As I was growing up, I was always taught that fish fell into the same category as other animals like sheep, deer and salmon.  They all spell their singular and plural exactly alike.  So during dive briefings I would tell my divers they were likely to see many fish on their dive and so on. Whenever divers would ask me “What were those fishes we saw?” I would simply ignore their bad grammar and concentrate on the fish ID. I figured a 23 year-old backpacker wouldn’t appreciate (or care!) that fish were always fish, and never fishes.

But now I have a responsibility to a 19-month old boy who likes to copy what I say.  So far he can identify a shark, manta and Nemo so I feel the need to get this right.  I don’t want to be teaching him bad habits that – evidently – some people never grow out of. But when I saw fishes appear on screen during an Animal Planet TV show, that was the last straw. I was going to find out once and for all which was correct.

So what’s the result?

Well, I think I have been right. Kind of. But so were the others. It seems that the English language is not so straightforward.

The Oxford English Dictionary cites the plural of fish as “same or fishes”. What? That can’t be an acceptable explanation!  What was Luca Brasi grammatically sleeping with in The Godfather?

Upon further fishing (sorry!) it seems that the word is rather troublesome, with usage varying. The best clarification that I could find was that using the plural form fish could mean many individual fish of the same species while fishes could imply many individuals of differing species.

What about Octopus?

Somehow I’m left rather disappointed by my findings – I was hoping to have a more definitive answer. Surely I would get a clearer answer to my question of what to say if I saw more than one octopus. Octopi? Octopuses? Or plain old octopus?

Well the standard plural in English of octopus is “octopuses”. However the word octopus comes from Greek and the Greek plural form “octopodes” is still occasionally used. What we can say with certainty however, is that “octopi”, formed according to rules for some Latin plurals, is most definitely incorrect.

So that has cleared up the issue, right? No, I didn’t think so.