Idiom
fish out of water
Meaning
A person in unfamiliar and often uncomfortable surroundings.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“At the fancy party, I felt like a fish out of water.”
“You look like a fish out of water in that kitchen.”
“She feels like a fish out of water at the new gym.”
“Being a country boy in the big city, he often felt like a fish out of water.”
“When the athlete tried to join the quiet book club, he felt like a fish out of water among the scholars.”
“The experienced mechanic felt like a fish out of water when he had to work in the modern software office.”
“Thrown into the corporate world after years of teaching, she wandered through the glass-walled offices like a fish out of water, unsure how to speak or dress.”
Examples
simple
“At the fancy party, I felt like a fish out of water.”
“You look like a fish out of water in that kitchen.”
“She feels like a fish out of water at the new gym.”
contextual
“Being a country boy in the big city, he often felt like a fish out of water.”
“When the athlete tried to join the quiet book club, he felt like a fish out of water among the scholars.”
“The experienced mechanic felt like a fish out of water when he had to work in the modern software office.”
complex
“Thrown into the corporate world after years of teaching, she wandered through the glass-walled offices like a fish out of water, unsure how to speak or dress.”
Origin
* Earliest recorded uses: "fish out of the water" (1585, Lamentable Complaint of Commonality), "Fishes out of the Water" (1613, Samuel Purchas, Pilgrimage). * Earliest use of metaphor by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales: Prologue (c. 1405) as "fissh þᵗ is waterlees". Compare also the antonymous French comme un poisson dans l'eau, German wie ein Fisch im Wasser.
Key words
Related idioms
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