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Glite Dictionary
🐟 A river fish 🦋 A brown butterfly
grayling

grayling

1 6.7
A freshwater fish with a tall colorful fin on its back that lives in cold streams
  • noun
  • /ˈɡreɪlɪŋ/
: tenca
  • However, this ability is greatly reduced when grayling occur with lake trout.
  • grayling lakes
  • grayling and trout
  • arctic grayling

Examples

  • Lake E-1 naturally contained only grayling, which rarely feed on larval chironomids, although adult chironomids constitute a significant part of their diet (Merrick et al. 1992).

    Academic text (1999)

  • They use rod and reels for grayling and trout; in the winter, they jig through the ice for grayling and burbot.

    Academic text (2007)

  • There's grayling under this ice.

    Fiction book (1993)

  • Grayling cannot overwinter in shallow lakes, but because such lakes are entirely littoral, food availability may be higher than in the larger lakes or streams where grayling normally spend the summer.

    Academic text (1999)

  • Many anglers visit the river hoping to catch a delicious grayling for dinner.

  • In the clear waters of the stream, we often spot grayling swimming gracefully beneath the surface.

  • Fishermen were thrilled to reel in large grayling during their trip to the cold northern river.

Surface Forms

grayling singular
graylings plural

Morphology

grayling = gray (semi-transparent) = gray + ling

The fish name is transparently formed from 'gray' plus '-ling', but the learned meaning is a conventional species name rather than a predictable literal description.

Etymology

Grayling comes from the simple parts gray and -ling, where -ling means 'small' as in duckling, so it once meant a 'little gray one'. That makes sense for the freshwater fish too, which was named for its greyish body and so is easy to remember by its colour.