嚯 (huò): wow; whoa (expressing surprise…

Meanings

1 wow; whoa (expressing surprise or admiration)
2 (onomatopoeia) sound of a laugh

Characters

嚯

huò

exclamation of surprise

Examples

嚯，这也太贵了吧！

Huò, zhè yě tài guì le ba!

Whoa, this is way too expensive!

嚯！你什么时候学会开车的？

Huò! Nǐ shénme shíhou xuéhuì kāichē de?

Wow! When did you learn to drive?

Tips

register

嚯 is very colloquial and expressive. It conveys sudden surprise, often with a hint of being impressed or taken aback. Common in spoken Chinese and online chat.

Components

radical

口 kǒu

mouth

Mouth radical on the left — the indexing radical for any interjection. Exclamations of surprise leave the mouth in a sharp burst; 口 marks 嚯 as something said, not something done. Sits alongside other surprise-words 哇, 哎, 哟 in the same mouth-noise family.

phonetic

霍 huò

swift; sudden (here phonetic)

Right side 霍 supplies the sound huò directly. 霍 originally pictured rain (雨) over short-tailed birds (隹) flying away in a startled scatter — a perfect semantic bonus for an interjection of surprise. The whole sound-and-image fit is unusually tight: a sudden noise that makes everything take wing.