A moue is a little grimace or pout, often expressing sulkiness or mischief. It shares an origin with 'mow' and traces back to Middle Dutch words related to a protruding lip.
A moue is a little grimace or pout, often expressing sulkiness or mischief. It shares an origin with 'mow' and traces back to Middle Dutch words related to a protruding lip.
| Word | moue |
|---|---|
| Date | June 14, 2017 |
| Type | noun |
| Syllables | MOO |
| Etymology | Moue is one of two similar words in English that refer to a pout or grimace; the other is mow, which is pronounced to rhyme either with no or now. Mow and moue share the same origin—the Anglo-French mouwe—and have a distant relationship to a Middle Dutch word for a protruding lip. (They do not, however, share a relationship to the word mouth, which derives from Old English mūth.) While current evidence of moue in use in English traces back only a little more than 150 years, mow dates all the way back to the 14th century. Moue has also seen occasional use as a verb, as when Nicholson Baker, in a 1988 issue of The New Yorker, described how a woman applying lip gloss would "slide the lip from side to side under it and press her mouth together and then moue it outward…." |
| Examples | "I like … the way her eyes twinkle with mischief even as her mouth is set in a sulky fashionista moue." — Judith Woods, The Daily Telegraph (London), 16 Sept. 2016 "But it's [Ian] McKellen we're always watching, with his twitches and moues and wistful … recollections…." — Euan Ferguson, The Observer (London), 1 Nov. 2015 |
| Definition | : a little grimace : pout |
Tags: wordoftheday::noun
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