Moue

WORD OF THE DAY


moue \ MOO \ noun


Definition
1: a little grimace
2: 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…."