Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Any of various small sharks chiefly of the family Squalidae, often occurring in large schools.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A name of various selachians and fishes belonging to widely distinct families.
- noun A name of the menobranchus or mud-puppy, Necturus maculatus, a batrachian reptile.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Zoöl.) A small shark, of many species, of the genera Mustelus, Scyllium, Spinax, etc.
- noun The bowfin (
Amia calva ). SeeBowfin . - noun The burbot of Lake Erie.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Any of various small
sharks , especially those from the families Scyliorhinidae,Dalatiidae , andSqualidae . - noun US The
bowfin , Amia calva.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun primitive long-bodied carnivorous freshwater fish with a very long dorsal fin; found in sluggish waters of North America
- noun any of several small sharks
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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These they called dogfish and nurse and we have citations for those uses back about 100 years before this new fancy shark word.
podictionary - for word lovers - dictionary etymology, trivia & history 2008
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I forgot to mention the salt-water dogfish, which is a kind of shark and is an important food fish,IIRC.
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I forgot to mention the salt-water dogfish, which is a kind of shark and is an important food fish,IIRC.
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My dogfish is a salt water shark that has skin that can be used as sandpaper, and bears its young live.
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There's a fish in my home town called a dogfish, which as far as I can tell is a purely local name and means different things in different areas.
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"But after all, a dogfish is a shark, and aren't sharks the most vicious creatures o 'the sea?"
The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries Francis Rolt-Wheeler 1918
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In the three-year period ending with 2009, the hook-and-line groundfish fleet reported catching a total of 4,622 sharks, not including the spiny dogfish, which is the subject of a commercial fishery.
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In the three-year period ending with 2009, the hook-and-line groundfish fleet reported catching a total of 4,622 sharks, not including the spiny dogfish, which is the subject of a commercial fishery.
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Incidentally, I always thought a "dogfish" was a nasty little shark, about 3' long, which favors rocky coastlines.
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I used this DB to try to figure out what the local Minnesota "dogfish" is.
treeseed commented on the word dogfish
Bowfins are an order (Amiiformes) of primitive ray-finned fish. Only one species, the bowfin Amia calva, family Amiidae, exists today, although additional species in six families are known from Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Eocene fossils. These included the huge Leedsichthys, the biggest fish that ever existed. The bowfin and the gar are two of the freshwater fishes still extant that existed, almost unchanged from their current form, while the great dinosaurs roamed the earth.
_Wikipedia
I used to catch a bowfin that locals called a dogfish when I lived in Minnesota.
February 4, 2008