Word of the Day

: April 4, 2009

moue

noun MOO

What It Means

: a little grimace : pout

moue in Context

"She made a little moue, shrugged one shoulder, dipped her head ever so slightly to set the artificial bird atop her hat in motion." (T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Road to Wellville)

Did You Know?

Moue is one of two similar-sounding words in English that refer to a pout or grimace; the other is "mow," which is pronounced to rhyme either with "no" or "now." "Mow" and "mou" share the same origin (the Anglo-French "mouwe") and a distant relationship to a Middle Dutch word for a protruding lip. (They do not, however, share a relationship to the word "mouth," which derives from Old English "mŪth.") While use of "moue" in English only traces back a little more than 150 years, "mow" dates all the way back to the 14th century. "Moue" has also seen occasional use as a verb, as when Nicholson Baker, in the August 15, 1988 New Yorker, described how a woman applying lip gloss would "slide the lip from side to side under it and press her mouth together and then moue it outward…"