[Vocabulary] fish shop or fish store?

[emsr2d2]

If I'm buying fish for dinner, then I'd be looking for a seafood market.

BrE differentiates between fish and seafood. Fish shops (fishmongers) sell just raw fish. Seafood is things like crab, mussels, whelks etc.

 

[jutfrank]

BrE differentiates between fish and seafood. Fish shops (fishmongers) sell just raw fish.

Really? I've never been to a fishmonger where you can't buy kinds of seafood other than fish.

 

[emsr2d2]

I'm probably not the best person to comment on this (as I'm vegan) but there is a fishmongers in a road near where I work, and I walk past it quite regularly on my lunchtime stroll. They definitely sell only fish. There's a price board in the window and seafood is not mentioned on it anywhere. The window display contains only fish too.

 

[GoesStation]

BrE differentiates between fish and seafood. Fish shops (fishmongers) sell just raw fish. Seafood is things like crab, mussels, whelks etc.

Years ago, an American friend was in England with his English wife. He needed a pen and, spotting a stationer's shop, popped in to get one. The shopkeeper was flummoxed by his bizarre request. He said "This is a stationer's. We don't sell pens!" Apparently stationers' only sold stationery (paper), not the things you use to write on it.

 

[Skrej]

BrE differentiates between fish and seafood. Fish shops (fishmongers) sell just raw fish. Seafood is things like crab, mussels, whelks etc.

The 'sea' in 'seafood' in AmE really just means 'aquatic'. There's not necessarily anything oceanic about it. Even non-fish bounty harvested from swamps (alligators, frogs, and crawdads for example) is all lumped under the term 'seafood'. Mountain trout or even those mud cats and bullheads I used to pull out of our tailwater pit some 1,000 miles from the nearest ocean is all 'seafood', if not simply 'fish'.

 

[probus]

Lake Erie, alone among the Great Lakes of North America, still supports a comnercial fishery. The vessels of the fleet migrate from place to place around the lake according to the seasons, but their home port is the little town of Port Dover, Ontario, population 3,500 or so. And Port Dover still supports one or two retail outlets that sell the catch. Personally I call them fish stores but many people hereabouts would say fish shops.

 

[GoesStation]

According to this article, there's still commercial fishing on all five of the Great Lakes, with Lake Ontario having the smallest catch.