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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

maw.

The upper digestive tract (where food enters the body), especially the mouth and jaws of an animal.

3 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/mɔː/Received-Pronunciation/mɔ/General-American/mɑ/cot-caught-merger

  1. The upper digestive tract (where food enters the body), especially the mouth and jaws of an animal.

    countable · uncountable

  2. The upper digestive tract (where food enters the body), especially the mouth and jaws of an animal. The mouth and jaws of a furry.

    countable · slang · uncountable

  3. The mouth.

    countable · derogatory · slang · uncountable
    Shut your maw!

  4. Any large, insatiable or perilous opening.

    countable · figuratively · uncountable

  5. Appetite; inclination.

    obsolete · uncountable

  6. The swim bladder of a fish, especially when used as food in Chinese cuisine.

    countable · uncountable

  7. The stomach, especially of an animal.

    archaic · countable · uncountable
Where this word comes from

From Middle English mawe, maghe, maȝe, from Old English maga (“stomach; maw”), from Proto-West Germanic *magō, from Proto-Germanic *magô (“belly; stomach”), from Proto-Indo-European *mak-, *maks- (“bag, bellows, belly”). Cognates Cognate with West Frisian mage, Dutch maag (“stomach; belly”), German Low German Maag, German Magen (“stomach”), Danish mave, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish mage (“stomach; belly”), and also with Welsh megin (“bellows”), archaic Russian мошна́ (mošná, “pocket, bag”), Lithuanian mãkas (“purse”), Finnish maha (“stomach”), Estonian magu (“stomach”).

noun/mɔː/Received-Pronunciation/mɔ/General-American/mɑ/cot-caught-merger

  1. Mother.

    colloquial · dialectal
Where this word comes from

Variant of ma.

noun/mɔː/Received-Pronunciation/mɔ/General-American/mɑ/cot-caught-merger

  1. A gull.

  2. A person from a rural area of the Isle of Lewis, i.e. outwith Stornoway; a country bumpkin.

    Lewis · slang
Where this word comes from

See mew (“a gull”), Norwegian måke (“a gull”)

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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.