Ichthyophagi

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A community that relies predominantly on fish for nourishment and sustenance
2. A population that engages in fishing and predominantly eats aquatic creatures for their dietary needs
3. Groups of people whose diet consists mainly of fish as their primary food source

Etymology: Ichthyophagi is a Greek plural meaning "fish-eaters," built from "ichthys" (fish) and "phagos" (eating, from "phagein," to eat). The Greeks used it as an ethnic label for peoples living on the coasts of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, and the best-known account comes from Herodotus, who wrote of such groups in his Histories. For the Greeks, these were distant, somewhat exotic communities whose diet set them apart from the grain- and meat-eating societies of the Mediterranean. The term is a learned compound formed from Greek roots, so its meaning is transparent: it describes a people by what they ate. Because it names a group rather than a single food, it has always been a category label more than a precise ethnographic description, and classical writers applied it loosely to several different coastal populations.