摩拜 (Móbài): Mobike — bike-sharing brand (no…

Meanings

1 Mobike — bike-sharing brand (now part of Meituan)
2 Mobike (orange-wheeled bike-share originally launched 2015)

Characters

摩

to bow / worship (phonetic)

Examples

我以前每天骑摩拜上班。

Wǒ yǐqián měitiān qí Móbài shàngbān.

I used to ride a Mobike to work every day.

摩拜后来被美团收购,改名美团单车了。

Móbài hòulái bèi Měituán shōugòu, gǎi míng Měituán Dānchē le.

Mobike was later acquired by Meituan and renamed Meituan Bike.

Tips

culture

Mobike (摩拜单车) and ofo (黄色小黄车) led China's mid-2010s bike-sharing boom — at peak, every Chinese city was flooded with orange Mobikes and yellow ofos. Mobike was acquired by Meituan in 2018 and rebranded to 美团单车. ofo collapsed by 2019. The era left a lasting vocabulary of QR-code unlock (扫码开锁) and shared-economy phrases.

memory

摩拜 reads móbài, mimicking the English brand 'Mo-bike'. The chosen characters 摩 (rub/touch) + 拜 (worship/bow) have no semantic relation to bikes — it's a pure phonetic borrowing.