Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Food; victuals.
  • intransitive verb To eat.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To chew.
  • noun The jowl: used only in the phrase “cheek for chow” (that is, cheek by jowl).
  • To grumble.
  • noun A word forming part of the names of many places in China, indicating either a prefecture or district of the second rank or the chief city of such a district: thus, Ning-hai-chow may mean either the district of Ning-hai or the city of Ning-hai. Sometimes spelled chao, chau, and choo.
  • noun A unit of weight in Bombay, used for gold and silver, and equal to three tenths of a troy grain.
  • noun A unit of the nature of the square of a mass, used in the East Indies in the valuation of pearls. A Madras chow is 48 square grains troy, a Bombay chow 15.7 square grains.
  • noun A Chinaman. [Colloq., Australia.]

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A prefecture or district of the second rank in China, or the chief city of such a district; -- often part of the name of a city, as in Foochow.
  • noun a breed of thick-coated medium-sized dogs with fluffy curled tails and distinctive blue-black tongues; -- same as chowchow{3}, n..

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb To (use a tile or tiles to) piece together a winning combination of tiles.
  • noun slang, uncountable Food, especially snacks.
  • noun A Chinese breed of dog; the chow-chow.
  • noun slang A Chinese person.
  • verb slang, South Africa To eat.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun informal terms for a meal
  • noun breed of medium-sized dogs with a thick coat and fluffy curled tails and distinctive blue-black tongues; believed to have originated in northern China
  • noun the imperial dynasty of China from 1122 to 221 BC; notable for the rise of Confucianism and Taoism

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Variant of chow chow.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Possibly from Cantonese zaap6, food, miscellany; see chop suey.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Shortened from chow-chow.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Chinese.

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