/ə ˈfɪʃ aʊt əv ˈwɔːtə/
English idiom, everyday. Someone who feels uncomfortable and out of place in unfamiliar surroundings.
Draft Not yet checked by a native English speaker.
How do people use A fish out of water
?
Everyday English, fine anywhere. It nearly always comes with “feel” or “be” and often “like”: “I felt like a fish out of water at that party.” Film and TV people use it as a label for the story type too, as in “a fish-out-of-water comedy”.
Also said like a fish out of water
A fish out of water
in real sentences
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I feel like a fish out of water.
Tatoeba, sentence by CK, CC BY 2.0 FR
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All the other children in the school had rich parents, and he was beginning to feel like a fish out of water.
Tatoeba, sentence by xtofu80, CC BY 2.0 FR
Where does A fish out of water
come from?
The idea is old: Chaucer, in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (around 1400), compares a monk outside his cloister to a fish without water. The Oxford English Dictionary, as cited by Wiktionary, has “fish out of the water” from 1585, and Samuel Purchas wrote in 1613 that desert Arabs taken out of the desert were “as Fishes out of the Water”.
Mistakes learners make with A fish out of water
Mixing it up with its opposite. French “comme un poisson dans l’eau” and German “wie ein Fisch im Wasser” mean perfectly at home, and “like a fish in water” isn’t a set phrase in English, so say “in my element” for that.
Other English idioms like A fish out of water
Spot a mistake in A fish out of water
?
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