哄 (hōng): roar of laughter; hubbub; uproa…

Meanings

1 roar of laughter; hubbub; uproar (onomatopoeic)
2 to roar (as a crowd); (of many people) to act all at once

Characters

哄

hōng

roar of laughter; hubbub; uproar (onomatopoeic)

Examples

他的笑话让全场哄堂大笑。

Tā de xiàohuà ràng quánchǎng hōngtáng-dàxiào.

His joke had the whole room bursting into laughter.

打折消息一公布，顾客就一哄而上。

Dǎzhé xiāoxi yī gōngbù, gùkè jiù yīhōng'érshàng.

As soon as the sale was announced, customers rushed in all at once.

Tips

usage

The hōng reading is the noise-of-a-crowd word — onomatopoeic, paints a soundscape. Key collocations: 哄堂大笑 (whole room roars with laughter), 哄笑 (hoots of laughter), 哄抬 (to inflate prices artificially via mass behavior), 哄抢 (panic-buying / looting). The 一哄+verb pattern (一哄而上, 一哄而散, 一哄而起) describes a crowd surging into or out of action all at once.

memory

Picture the difference: hǒng is one mouth whispering into one ear (coaxing), hōng is many mouths blowing up at once (the room roaring). The first-tone hōng even sounds louder — keep the tone-volume association in mind.

Components

radical

口 kǒu

mouth

Same mouth radical as in the hǒng reading. In the hōng sense the radical takes on a 'many mouths' feeling — the noise of a crowd, not one quiet voice.

phonetic

共 gòng

together; common

Same 共 phonetic, and here the 'together' meaning lights up: a crowd ALL TOGETHER producing the noise. The hōng reading is the most semantically transparent of the three — mouths + together = roar of a crowd.