Word.ws English Dictionary

lo mein loophole

lo mein loophole proper noun: a loophole in early-1900s American immigration law that allowed Chinese people to enter the country if they managed a Chinese restaurant, resulting in a greater-than-average increase of those establishments over several decades.

Proper noun

lo mein loophole

  1. (US, historical) A loophole in early-1900s American immigration law that allowed Chinese people to enter the country if they managed a Chinese restaurant, resulting in a greater-than-average increase of those establishments over several decades.
    • "Lo Mein Loophole: How U.S. Immigration Law Fueled A Chinese Restaurant Boom [...] Some Chinese business owners in the U.S. could get special merchant visas that allowed them to travel to China, and bring back employees. Only a few types of businesses qualified for this status. In 1915, a federal...2016 February 22, “Lo Mein Loophole: How U.S. Immigration Law Fueled A Chinese Restaurant Boom”, in National Public Radio, retrieved 18 Jun 2023

Questions about lo mein loophole

What does lo mein loophole mean?
Lo mein loophole means a loophole in early-1900s American immigration law that allowed Chinese people to enter the country if they managed a Chinese restaurant, resulting in a greater-than-average increase of those establishments over several decades.
What part of speech is lo mein loophole?
Lo mein loophole is a proper noun.

Words near lo mein loophole in the dictionary

  1. lo and behold
  2. lo bak
  3. lo hei
  4. Lo Iacono
  5. lo mein
  6. lo mein loophole
  7. lo pak
  8. Lo Wu
  9. Lo'd
  10. lo-cal
  11. lo-fi

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lo mein loophole (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-lo mein loophole.wav.

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