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

HSK 1

嚯，这也太贵了吧！

Huò, zhè yě tài guì le ba!

Whoa, this is way too expensive!

HSK 6

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.