Word.ws English Dictionary

chow

/t͡ʃaʊ/UK/t͡ʃaʊ/

chow noun: food, especially snacks.

Noun (1)

chow (usually uncountable, plural chows)

  1. (slang, usually) Food, especially snacks.
    • I'm going to pick up some chow for dinner.
    • Donlon says, "Well, we're rich and we got beaucoup beer and beaucoup chow. Now all we need is the Bob Hope show."1979, Gustav Hasford, The Short-Timers, New York: Bantam Books, published 1980, →ISBN, page 93
  2. (Trinidad-and-Tobago, usually) Unripe, or partially ripened, fruit seasoned and served as a dish, e.g. pineapple chow or mango chow.
  3. (usually) A Chow Chow.
    • ‘I'd try and grapple with him myself, only I've got my chow in my room, you know, and he goes for pigs wherever he finds them.’1914, Saki, ‘The Lull’, Beasts and Superbeasts
    • While we were talking, one of the chows, the rusty one, had come over to me and I was absently petting him.1988 March 4, Jane Weinberg, “First Person: Me and Georgia O'Keeffe”, in Chicago Reader
  4. (Australia, archaic, slang, usually) A Chinese person.
    • These were the creatures Nawnim had been amazed to see about him on the day of his arrival. When he inquired about them, Anna told him they were Japs an' Chows.1938, Xavier Herbert, chapter V, in Capricornia, page 74
    • ‘Now look here old man if you should ever bump into an interesting Chow from over the river – one with access, follow me? – just you remember High Haven!’1977, John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy, Folio Society, published 2010, page 11

Verb (1)

chow (third-person singular simple present chows, present participle chowing, simple past and past participle chowed)

  1. (South Africa, slang) To eat.

Noun (2)

chow (plural chows)

  1. A prefecture or district of the second rank in China, or the chief city of such a district.

Noun (3)

chow (plural chows)

  1. A run of three consecutive tiles of the same suit.
    Synonyms:
    sequence
  2. A call for forming such a run using a discarded tile.
    Synonyms:
    chii

Verb (2)

chow (third-person singular simple present chows, present participle chowing, simple past and past participle chowed)

  1. To call a discarded tile to produce a chow.
    • […] while the adversary on his right will repeatedly bury in the discard the very tiles he wishes to chow but can't.2007, Eleanor Noss Whitney, A Mah Jong Handbook: How to Play, Score, and Win, page 154
    Synonyms:
    chii

Proper noun capitalized: Chow

Chow

  1. A surname from Cantonese.
  2. (alternative, obsolete) Alternative form of Zhou (“dynasty, realm, and era”).

Noun (4) capitalized: Chow

Chow (plural Chows)

  1. A Chow Chow (Chinese breed of dog).
    • Colin was a Chow; an interesting Chinese breed that looks a bit like a Pomeranian on steroids[.]2005, Paul Carter, Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, page 153

chow meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Bengali

chow in Hindi

चाउ

chow in Tamil

சோவ், சௌ

chow in Marathi

चॉ

chow in Bengali

চৌ, চাউ
More languagesFewer languages
chow in Telugu
చౌ, చోవ్
chow in Malayalam
ചൌ
chow in Kannada
ಚೌ, ಚೋವ್
chow in Odia
ଚୌ, ଚାଉ
chow in Nepali
चाउ
chow in Vietnamese
thức ăn

Examples of chow in a sentence

  • I've already spent hundreds of dollars buying dog chow.
  • We're all famished; it's time to chow down.
  • In those days a prisoner here had to carry his ball and chain when he was walking to the chow hall.

All 26 example sentences with chow

Synonyms of chow

Forms of chow

Noun
pluralchows
pluralChows
Verb
third-person singular presentchows
present participlechowing
past participlechowed
pastchowed

Plural of chow: chows

Origin of chow

Shortened from chow-chow, from Chinese Pidgin English chow-chow. Compare Macanese chau-cháu. See also English chow fun, chow mein, etc.

Borrowed from Chinese 州 (zhōu).

Phono-semantic matching of Chinese 吃 (chī, literally “to eat”), influenced by the “food” sense of Etymology 1 above.

Words formed from chow

Phrases with chow

8 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with chow

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about chow

What does chow mean?
Chow means food, especially snacks.
What is chow in Hindi?
Chow in Hindi is चाउ. See Chow meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is chow?
Chow can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce chow?
Chow is pronounced /t͡ʃaʊ/ (UK).
What is the plural of chow?
The plural of chow is chows.

Words near chow in the dictionary

  1. Chouzy-sur-Cisse
  2. CHOV
  3. chovah
  4. Chovanec
  5. Chovanecs
  6. chow
  7. chow call
  8. chow calls
  9. chow chow
  10. chow chows
  11. chow down

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chow (page history and authors); Chow (page history and authors); chow (Hindi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); chow (Tamil, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); chow (Marathi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); chow (Bengali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); chow (Telugu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); chow (Malayalam, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); chow (Kannada, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); chow (Odia, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); chow (Nepali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: EN-AU ck1 chow.ogg.

Cite this entry: “chow.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chow. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.