Meaning
A completely different matter or situation; something quite separate from the thing just mentioned, usually contrasted in scale, difficulty, or kind. Confusingly, it belongs to the same family as 'a pretty kettle of fish', which means a mess or muddle instead. Informal and chiefly British, though understood across Commonwealth and American English. Remember the split: 'a different kettle of fish' is a contrast, while 'a pretty kettle of fish' is a mess. Regional use: Chiefly British English.
Origin
The older phrase is 'a pretty kettle of fish', a mess or muddle, first found in Henry Fielding's novel Joseph Andrews (1742). Two rival explanations for the kettle exist. In one, it is the fish kettle, a long poaching pan used since the seventeenth century; by the 1780s a 'kettle of fish' also named a riverside fete on the Tweed, described in Thomas Newte's A Tour in England and Scotland (1785), where tents were pitched, fires lit, and live salmon thrown into boiling kettles. In the other, argued by Ebenezer Cobham Brewer in 1877 with no supporting evidence, the word is a corruption of 'kiddle', a fish weir or net named in Magna Carta and glossed in Blount's 1670 law dictionary; the Phrase Finder judges the saucepan image likelier, since kettle was the familiar word. The variant 'a different kettle of fish', meaning quite another matter, is first recorded in London's Morning Advertiser of June 1847 - 'or boil a very different kettle of fish' - became common in Scotland and northern England, where fish kettles were everyday objects, and overtook the older pretty sense in print around 1950.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a whole different kettle of fish
- another kettle of fish
- quite a different kettle of fish
Usage Examples
- Cooking Sunday lunch for four is easy; catering a wedding for two hundred is a different kettle of fish.
- I enjoy a gentle walk in the hills, but winter mountaineering is a different kettle of fish entirely.
- Reviewing one manuscript is manageable; judging three hundred entries is a different kettle of fish.