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chow

nounverbnounnounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//t͡ʃaʊ//

Food, especially snacks.

noun

  1. 1

    slangFood, especially snacks.

    I'm going to pick up some chow for dinner.

    Donlon says, "Well, we're rich and we got beaucoup beer and beaucoup chow. Now all we need is the Bob Hope show."

  2. 2

    Unripe, or partially ripened, fruit seasoned and served as a dish, e.g. pineapple chow or mango chow.

  3. 3

    A Chow Chow.

    ‘I'd try and grapple with him myself, only I've got my chow in my room, you know, and he goes for pigs wherever he finds them.’

    While we were talking, one of the chows, the rusty one, had come over to me and I was absently petting him.

  4. 4

    archaicA Chinese person.

    These were the creatures Nawnim had been amazed to see about him on the day of his arrival. When he inquired about them, Anna told him they were Japs an' Chows.

    ‘Now look here old man if you should ever bump into an interesting Chow from over the river – one with access, follow me? – just you remember High Haven!’

Etymology

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

verb

  1. 1

    slangTo eat.

noun

  1. 1

    A prefecture or district of the second rank in China, or the chief city of such a district.

Etymology

Borrowed from Chinese 州 (zhōu).

noun

  1. 1

    A run of three consecutive tiles of the same suit.

  2. 2

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

Etymology

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

verb

  1. 1

    To call a discarded tile to produce a chow.

    […] while the adversary on his right will repeatedly bury in the discard the very tiles he wishes to chow but can't.

Forms

plural
chows
past tense
chowed
past participle
chowed
present participle
chowing
third person singular
chows
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).