Fishy expressions

The Language Portal’s navigation menu

Good news: the Language Portal of Canada has a new menu that will help you to easily navigate between our language resources and quickly find answers to your language-related questions!

Want to learn how to use the menu? Check out this short tutorial on the new features.

Certain fish are a good source of Omega-3s. Certain fish make good pets. And certain fish make for good English idioms! That's right, the names of some fish, and even the word fish itself, have made their way into many English expressions. Try our quiz to see how many of them you know!

1. “To fish or cut bait” means to Placeholder for the answer.
2. Which of the following words completes the idiom “to fish in Placeholder for the answer waters”?
3. If you find yourself in “a fine kettle of fish,” you're in an Placeholder for the answer situation.
4. A “red Placeholder for the answer” is a misleading clue.
5. If someone is “as slippery as an eel,” he or she is …
6. In the expression “to have bigger fish to fry,” “bigger fish” refers to more Placeholder for the answer matters to attend to.
7. The expression “packed in like Placeholder for the answer” is a synonym for “extremely crowded.”
8. Which of the following words completes the idiom “as Placeholder for the answer as a barrel of fish hooks”?
9. If something is declining in quality and popularity after having reached its peak, it is said to have “jumped the Placeholder for the answer.”
10. “A big fish in a small pond” is a person who has a lot of …
  
Date modified:

Search with Language Navigator

Language Navigator searches through the Language Portal of Canada’s resources to help you quickly find answers to questions about language or writing, in English and French.

Quiz categories

Click on a quiz category.

Other resources on the Language Portal