The story
* Earliest recorded uses: "fish out of the water" (1585, Lamentable Complaint of Commonality), "Fishes out of the Water" (1613, Samuel Purchas, Pilgrimage). * Earliest use of metaphor by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales: Prologue (c. 1405) as "fissh þᵗ is waterlees". Compare also the antonymous French comme un poisson dans l'eau, German wie ein Fisch im Wasser.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.