moo goo gai pan
2
8.4
- noun
- /muː ɡuː ɡaɪ pæn/
- US
:
moo goo gai pan
- She fills up her plate with fried rice, moo goo gai pan, a shrimp and veggie dish, and an egg roll.
- get the moo goo gai pan
Examples
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I won't trade mini-Snickers for moo goo gai pan.
Blog text (5) -
ROCKS: It's nothing fancy, but wait till you taste their moo goo gai pan.
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You call this moo goo gai pan?
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I said moo goo gai pan.
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Eating moo goo gai pan out of boxes every night, having dreams of death.
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I got moo goo gai pan, I got ribs, egg rolls maybe.
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At the restaurant, I ordered the moo goo gai pan because I love the combination of chicken and vegetables.
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She always enjoys a warm plate of moo goo gai pan when she visits her favorite Chinese restaurant.
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For dinner, we decided to share the moo goo gai pan along with some spring rolls.
Surface Forms
Morphology
moo + goo + gai + pan
This is a Cantonese loanword for a specific dish; most constituents are not English lexical items and the one English word 'pan' does not contribute to the dish meaning. A B1 learner who knows the English word 'pan' (and sees the other items as uninterpretable) would not be able to derive 'chicken and vegetables in a light sauce' from the parts, so the expression is lexicalized and non-compositional in English.
Etymology
Moo goo gai pan comes from Cantonese. The parts moo goo, gai, and pan mean 'mushroom', 'chicken', and 'slices', so the name pictures sliced chicken with mushrooms and explains why it refers to that light chicken-and-mushroom dish.