Wednesday 14 June 2017

moue - Word of the Day - 14/06/17

moue


noun

Pronunciation


 MOO

Definition


: a little grimace : pout

Examples


"I like … the way her eyes twinkle with mischief even as her mouth is set in a sulky fashionista moue." — Judith Woods, The Daily Telegraph (London), 16 Sept. 2016

"But it's [Ian] McKellen we're always watching, with his twitches and moues and wistful … recollections…." — Euan Ferguson, The Observer (London), 1 Nov. 2015

Did You Know?


Moue is one of two similar 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 moue share the same origin—the Anglo-French mouwe—and have 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 current evidence of moue in use in  English traces back only 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 a 1988 issue of The 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…."


Test Your Vocabulary


Unscramble the letters to create a word that can refer to the opening of the mouth or to a wide grimace: TISRUC.

Merriam-Webster

http://plotsandtension.blogspot.com.au/

No comments:

Post a Comment