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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

chow.

Food, especially snacks.

4 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/t͡ʃaʊ/UK
  1. Food, especially snacks.

    slang · uncountable · usually
    I'm going to pick up some chow for dinner.
  2. Unripe, or partially ripened, fruit seasoned and served as a dish, e.g. pineapple chow or mango chow.

    Trinidad-and-Tobago · uncountable · usually
  3. A Chow Chow.

    uncountable · usually
  4. A Chinese person.

    Australia · archaic · slang · uncountable · usually
Where this word comes from

Shortened from chow-chow, from Chinese Pidgin English chow-chow. Compare Macanese chau-cháu. See also English chow fun, chow mein, etc.

verb/t͡ʃaʊ/UK
  1. To eat.

    South-Africa · slang
Where this word comes from

Shortened from chow-chow, from Chinese Pidgin English chow-chow. Compare Macanese chau-cháu. See also English chow fun, chow mein, etc.

noun/t͡ʃaʊ/UK
  1. A prefecture or district of the second rank in China, or the chief city of such a district.

Where this word comes from

Borrowed from Chinese 州 (zhōu).

noun/t͡ʃaʊ/UK
  1. A run of three consecutive tiles of the same suit.

  2. A call for forming such a run using a discarded tile.

Where this word comes from

Phono-semantic matching of Chinese 吃 (chī, literally “to eat”), influenced by the “food” sense of Etymology 1 above.

verb/t͡ʃaʊ/UK
  1. To call a discarded tile to produce a chow.

Where this word comes from

Phono-semantic matching of Chinese 吃 (chī, literally “to eat”), influenced by the “food” sense of Etymology 1 above.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.