red herring
noun
Did you know?
Believe it or not, red herring has as much to do with hunting dogs as with brightly colored fish. Here's how: A herring is a soft-finned bony fish. People who like to eat herring have long preserved them by salting and slowly smoking them. That process makes a herring turn red or dark brown—and gives them a very strong smell. Dogs love to sniff such smelly treats, a fact that makes the fish a perfect diversion for anyone trying to distract hunting dogs from the trail of their quarry. The practice of using preserved fish to confuse hunting dogs led to the use of the term red herring for anything that diverts attention from the issue at hand.
Examples of red herring in a Sentence
Dani Di Placido, Forbes.com, 4 June 2025
To wit: the scene where Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss perform a fish autopsy on the tiger shark (the movie's red herring, to use more oceanic metaphors), and yank out its guts.
—Jordan Hoffman, EW.com, 4 June 2025
But Chinese orphanages had no records at all of birth parents, and most clues that adoptees find are red herrings.
—Barbara Demick, New Yorker, 23 May 2025
Fans predicted that Mari would be Pit Girl, but other people like Hanna (Ashley Sutton) came in as red herrings.
—Jackie Strause, HollywoodReporter, 15 Apr. 2025
See All Example Sentences for red herring
Cite this Entry
“Red herring.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/red%20herring. Accessed 17 Jun. 2025.
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