have other fish to fry
Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.
Meaning · English
Have more important things to do
Literally: be cooking other fish
Where it’s used:
Used
Widespread English
Examples
IBM and Hewlett - Packard appear to have other fish to fry.
Whether it was because he had other fish to fry is unrecorded, but Hartlepool's chippies had made the law courts before.
British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)
Sources & notes
Listed in Wiktionary’s “English idioms” category (retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-31; pending editor spot-check.
Common questions
What does “have other fish to fry” mean?
Have more important things to do Literally: be cooking other fish
Is “have other fish to fry” formal or informal?
No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.