Meaning
Creating a false personal identity online, or using one, to deceive someone, most often in pursuit of a fake romantic relationship. The word names both the act and the persona: a catfish is the fake profile or the person behind it, and to catfish someone is to lure them under that identity. Common in dating and social-media contexts worldwide. Informal and strongly negative, describing deliberate deception; sometimes used loosely for any online impersonation. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The slang use comes from the 2010 American documentary Catfish, which followed photographer Nev Schulman as his online romance with a supposed young woman unravelled into a middle-aged housewife's fabricated identity. In the film her husband, Vince Pierce, retells a story about shippers putting catfish in tanks of live cod to keep the cod from going numb, comparing such deceptions to the catfish that keep people on their toes; the underlying cod-and-catfish legend appears in print as early as 1913 in books by Henry Nevinson and Charles Marriott. The MTV docu-series Catfish: The TV Show, hosted by Schulman from 2012, cemented the term, and usage spiked in 2013 after football player Manti Te'o's publicly catfished relationship made headlines. Merriam-Webster added the new sense in the 2014 edition of its Collegiate Dictionary, its editors crediting both the documentary and the Te'o story.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- catfish
- catfish account
- catfished
- to catfish someone
Usage Examples
- She discovered she had been catfished when reverse image search traced her boyfriend's photos to a stock library.
- The profile was catfishing lonely subscribers with stolen pictures and a invented backstory.
- His sister warned him that anyone who refuses video calls for months might be a catfish.