Word.ws English Dictionary

di di mau

di di mau verb: to leave quickly, hurry away.

Verb

di di mau or di-di mau (defective verb)

  1. (defective, slang) To leave quickly, hurry away.
    • [Viet Cong guard, to prisoner forced to play Russian roulette:] MAU! MAU! DIDI MAU!1978, The Deer Hunter (via IMDB)
    • And if a Vietnamese, be it man, woman, or child, refused to di di mau or tried to get away, the authorization was to go ’head and shoot ’em.1984, Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War, Random House, →ISBN, page 171

Examples of di di mau in a sentence

  • "What part of "Di di Mau" don't you understand, Skinner?"2000, “Skinner’s Sense of Snow” (television episode), The Simpsons, December 17, 2000
  • “[…]Di di mau!” which means get moving, and is not very polite.2002, Nelson DeMille, Up country: a novel, →ISBN, page 138:

Origin of di di mau

Borrowed from Vietnamese đi đi mau (“go quickly!”). Borrowed into English by American military personnel returning from the Vietnam War, as well as by Vietnamese immigrants; popularized by the movie The Deer Hunter. This is an uncommon way to say "Hurry up!" in Vietnamese. The verb đi (“to go”) can be expressed as a command: "Đi đi! One may even express a sense of urgency with the word mau (“fast”): "Đi mau đi! However, Vietnamese speakers tend to use the verbs mau lên, nhanh lên, and vội lên in exactly the way an English speaker would use hurry up.

Questions about di di mau

What does di di mau mean?
Di di mau means to leave quickly, hurry away.
How do you use di di mau in a sentence?
"What part of "Di di Mau" don't you understand, Skinner?"
What part of speech is di di mau?
Di di mau is a verb.

Words near di di mau in the dictionary

  1. dhyes
  2. DHZ
  3. Dhārawaḍa
  4. di
  5. Di Carlo
  6. di di mau
  7. Di Donato
  8. di ex machina
  9. di ex machinis
  10. Di Giorgio
  11. di lo

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: di di mau (page history and authors). 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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Cite this entry: “di di mau.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/di_di_mau. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.