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
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