kowtow

• kotow

From Sinitic 叩頭 (Cantonese kau3 tau4, Mandarin kòutóu), literally "knock head".

• IPA^(key): /ˌkaʊˈtaʊ/

• Audio (US)

  (file)

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -aʊ

kowtow (third-person singular simple present kowtows, present participle kowtowing, simple past and past participle kowtowed)

1. (intransitive) To kneel and bow low enough to touch one’s forehead to the ground.
   • 2013, Wendy Swartz, Robert Ford Campany, Yang Lu, Jessey J. C. Choo, Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook, Columbia University Press (→ISBN), page 645

     When the weather turned cold, the tears that he shed would become frozen like veins; the blood on his forehead from kowtowing would also freeze and would not drip.

2. (intransitive) To bow very deeply.

   (Can we add an example for this sense?)

3. (intransitive, figuratively) To act in a very submissive manner.
   • 2015, Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, Yale University Press (→ISBN), page 265

     The letter to Razin contained another thought that preoccupied Stalin in the first months after the war: the need to avoid “kowtowing to the West,” including showing “unwarranted respect” for the “military authorities of Germany.”

• kowtower
• kowtowing

kowtow (plural kowtows)

1. The act of kowtowing.
   • 1990, Hugh D. R. Baker, Hong Kong Images: People and Animals, Hong Kong University Press (→ISBN), page 93

     Three elders dressed in their long silk ceremonial gowns perform the kowtow before the altar in their clan ancestral hall.

• prostrate

kowtow m (plural kowtows)

1. kowtow (bow low enough to touch one’s forehead to the ground)