mōu
interjection #19,114

Meanings

  1. 1 moo (the sound a cow makes)
  2. 2 onomatopoeia for lowing/mooing

Examples

Niú zài tiányě lǐ mōu mōu de jiào zhe.
The cows were mooing in the fields.
Háizi xué niú jiào: mōu!
The child imitated the cow: Moo!

Tips

culture
is a pure onomatopoeia, one of many Chinese animal-sound words. Cows say in Chinese, just as they say 'moo' in English — a rare case of cross-language onomatopoeic similarity.

Components

radical
kǒu
mouth
depicts an open mouth. As radical it marks as a sound-effect character — the mouth radical signals onomatopoeia, joining , characters whose job is to render audible noises in writing.
phonetic
móu
to seek; to low (of cattle)
supplies the sound (móu shifted to mōu) and a direct semantic boost — itself originally meant the lowing of cattle, with cow on top and a vapor mark below. Here it doubles down: is mouth + cattle-bellow, the sound a cow makes.

Stroke Order

mōu