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tofu

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈtəʊfuː//
  • United States//ˈtoʊfu//
  • //t̪o.fu//
  • //ʈo.fu//

A protein-rich food made from curdled soy milk.

noun

  1. 1

    A protein-rich food made from curdled soy milk.

    First, marinate the tofu. In a bowl, whisk the kecap manis, chilli sauce, and sesame oil together. Cut the tofu into strips about 1cm thick, mix gently (so it doesn't break) with the marinade and leave in the fridge for half an hour.

  2. 2

    A box or rectangle, empty or with a question mark or hexadecimal code inside, displayed by some systems in place of a character not supported by available fonts. (such as _□ or 𐕪)

Etymology

Borrowed from Japanese 豆(とう)腐(ふ) (tōfu), from Middle Chinese 豆腐 (duwᴴ bju^X, “curdled bean”). Doublet of dubu and doufu.

Forms

plural
tofus
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).