chow
/t͡ʃaʊ/ noun, verb, proper noun
Forms chows chowing chowed
- noun (slang, uncountable) Food, especially snacks. “I'm going to pick up some chow for dinner.”
- noun (Trinidad and Tobago) Unripe, or partially ripened, fruit seasoned and served as a dish, e.g. pineapple chow or mango chow.
- noun A Chow Chow.
- noun (chiefly Australia, slang, now rare) A Chinese person.
- verb (slang, South Africa) To eat.
- noun A prefecture or district of the second rank in China, or the chief city of such a district.
- noun (mahjong) A run of three consecutive tiles of the same suit.
- noun (mahjong) A call for forming such a run using a discarded tile.
- verb (mahjong) To call a discarded tile to produce a chow.
- proper noun A surname from Cantonese.
- noun A Chow Chow (Chinese breed of dog).
Synonyms
sequence chii Zhou Zhou dynasty Chou Chou dynasty Chow dynasty chuck eats grub chow chow
Etymology
Shortened from chow-chow, from Chinese Pidgin English chow-chow. Compare Macanese chau-cháu. See also English chow fun, chow mein, etc.
Borrowed from Chinese 州 (zhōu).
Phono-semantic matching of Chinese 吃 (chī, literally “to eat”), influenced by the “food” sense of Etymology 1 above.
From Cantonese 周 (zau¹).
Webster’s 1913
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “chow”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details