fish

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun Any of numerous cold-blooded aquatic vertebrates characteristically having fins, gills, and a streamlined body and including the bony fishes, such as catfishes and tunas, and the cartilaginous fishes, such as sharks and rays.
• noun Any of various jawless aquatic craniates, including the lampreys and hagfishes.
• noun The flesh of such animals used as food.
• noun Informal A person, especially one considered deficient in something.
• intransitive verb To catch or try to catch fish.
• intransitive verb To look for something by feeling one's way; grope.
• intransitive verb To seek something in a sly or indirect way.
• intransitive verb To catch or try to catch (fish).
• intransitive verb To catch or try to catch fish in.
• intransitive verb To catch or pull as if fishing.
• idiom (fish or cut bait) To proceed with an activity or abandon it altogether.
• idiom (like a fish out of water) Completely unfamiliar with one's surroundings or activity.
• idiom (neither fish nor fowl) Having no specific characteristics; indefinite.
• idiom (other fish to fry) Other matters to attend to.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun A counter used in various games.
• noun A vertebrate which has gills and fins adapting it for living in the water.
• noun In zoology: Any branchiferous vertebrate with a complete cranium and a lyriform shoulder-girdle. In this sense, the leptocardians and myzonts are excluded, but the selachians are included with true Pisces.
• noun A branchiferous or teleostomous vertebrate with dermal plates or membrane-bones superadded to the primordial cranium and shoulder-girdle, and with the branchiæ free outwardly. The sturgeons as well as all the osseous fishes are included in the group thus defined.
• noun In popular language, any animal that lives entirely in the water; a swimming as distinguished from a flying or walking animal, including cetaceous mammals, batrachians, mollusks, crustaceans, and echinoderms, as well as fishes proper: commonly distinguished by some specifying word, as blackfish, shellfish, starfish. See these and other compounds.
• noun The meat of a fish or of fishes used as food.
• noun The codfish: so called specifically by Cape Cod and Cape Ann fishermen, in distinction from fish of other kinds, as mackerel, herring, etc.
• noun The zodiacal sign Pisces.
• noun Nautical: A purchase used to raise the flukes of an anchor up to the bill-board. Also called a fish-tackle.
• noun A long piece of timber or iron used to strengthen a mast or a yard when sprung.
• noun In joinery, etc., a piece secured alongside of another to strengthen or stiffen it.
• noun Fish that are or may be caught with bait.
• noun Fish having a more or less ossified skeleton: thus distinguished from cartilaginous fish. See cut under Esox.
• noun See coarse fish.
• noun In ichthyology, a fish inhabiting the sea near the shore and in water of moderate depth: thus contrasting with deep-sea fish and pelagic fish.
• noun The squid or cuttlefish.
• noun See also whitefish.
• noun The Southern Fish, Piscis Australis or Austrinus.
• noun A name sometimes applied to fishes having ocellated spots of color resembling auxiliary eyes.
• noun Chænobryttus gulosus, one of the sun-fishes found in fresh waters of the eastern United States.
• To catch or attempt to catch fish; be employed in taking fish by any means, as by angling or drawing nets.
• To be arranged or adjusted so as to catch fish; bo capable of catching fish: as, the net or pound is fishing; the net was set, but was not fishing; the net fishes seven feet (that is, seven feet deep).
• To catch by means of any of the operations or processes of fishing: as, to fish minnows or lobsters.
• To attempt to catch fish in; try with any apparatus for catching fish, as a rod or net.
• To use in or for fishing: as, gill-nets are fished; an oysterman fishes his boat.
• To catch or lay hold of, in water, mud, or some analogous medium or position, as if by fishing; draw out or up; get or secure in any way with some difficulty or search, as if by angling.
• To search by dragging, raking, or sweeping.
• Nautical: To strengthen, as a weak spar, by lashing one or more pieces of wood or iron along the weak place.
• To hoist the flukes of, as an anchor, up to the bill-board.
• In joinery, to strengthen, as a piece of wood, by fastening another piece above or below it, and sometimes both.
• In railroading, to splice, as rails, with a fish-joint.
• To obtain by careful search or study or by artifice; elicit by pains or stratagem: as, to fish out a meaning from an obscure sentence, a secret from a person, or an admission from an adverse witness.
• To pull up or out from or as from some deep place, as if by fishing: as, the boy fished out a top from the depths of his pocket.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• transitive verb To catch; to draw out or up.