fish
Fish fish fish fish fish fish fish.
The sentence is a recursive parse where some fish (noun) are caught by other fish (verb) which are themselves caught by yet other fish — a grammatical curiosity that exploits 'fish' as both noun and verb.
Meanings (pronounced /fɪʃ/)
a cold-blooded vertebrate animal that lives in water and has gills
- The aquarium held over fifty species of fish.
- Salmon is a popular fish for grilling.
to catch or attempt to catch fish; or, metaphorically, to seek something by indirect questioning
- They went out to fish at dawn.
- She was just fishing for compliments.
Word origin
From Old English fisc, from Proto-Germanic *fiskaz, from Proto-Indo-European *peysk-. The same root produces Latin piscis (whence 'pisces') and German Fisch. The plural 'fish' (rather than 'fishes') is one of the few remaining Old English unchanged plurals — fish has no plural marker because Proto-Germanic neuter nouns of this class never had one.
Fun fact
'Fish fish fish fish fish fish fish' is grammatical because 'fish' is one of those rare English words that's identical as singular noun, plural noun, and verb. Linguists call this kind of recursive sentence a 'garden path' construction — your brain tries one parse, hits a dead end, backtracks, and finds another.