kotow

Other forms of kotow

plural

kotows·

past tense

kotowed·

present participle

kotowing·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about kotow

What does kotow mean?

kotow means "a former Chinese custom of touching the ground with the forehead as a sign of respect or submission". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in kotow?

kotow has 2 syllables: ko-tow. The stress falls on "ko".

What is another word for kotow?

Close synonyms include kowtow, fawn, toady, truckle, bootlick. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is kotow a common word?

kotow is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.