09 Quit horsing around with those ghosts 🐎👻

For October we’re rolling out the spookiest hanmoji we can find.

Hello everyone! Welcome to October, the spookiest month of all. For this issue’s hanmoji puzzle, we began horsing around with Cantonese slang and came up with a ghost of a challenge for you.

This is Hanmoji Puzzles, your weekly dose of emoji word puzzles inspired by The Hanmoji Handbook. And don’t worry — you don’t need to speak Chinese at all in order to play along. You just need a love for emoji and be curious about how language works!

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🧩 This week’s puzzle

Ghosts appear in a number of Chinese stories, just like they do in all parts of the world. That’s why ghosts are part of the official emoji canon. The Chinese word 鬼 (pronounced guǐ in Mandarin and gwai2 in Cantonese), or ghost, is both a character and a radical (basic component). It’s also used in a lot of slang in combination with other characters.

Here’s one for you that’s popular in Cantonese (each emoji stands for an individual character):

👻🐎

Can you guess what this combination means? (Hint: The hint is in the title of this week’s issue.)

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🫢 Answer (spoilers ahead!)

👻🐎 stands for 鬼馬/鬼马 (guǐ mǎ/gwai2 maa5), which means sly/playful. Bring a ghost and a horse together in Cantonese, and the result isn’t spooky — it’s just a little mischief. In English, we say that someone is horsing around when they’re not taking things seriously. 

For example, a parent might gently chide their young children for being 👻👻🐎🐎 鬼鬼馬馬/鬼鬼马马 if they catch them sneaking around the house.

Notice anything familiar in the first two characters of this 1974 movie poster from Hong Kong about sly and playful gamblers?

Image from Wikipedia.

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🥳 Updates from our parent project, The Hanmoji Handbook

• We’re running multiple workshops at FOLD Kids this November!

• Our book is now out — order it now on IndieBound 🇺🇸, Shop Local 🇨🇦, Blackwell’s 🌏, Barnes & Noble 🇺🇸, or Indigo 🇨🇦.

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Hanmoji Puzzles is a spin off of The Hanmoji Handbook: A Guide to Learning Chinese Through Emoji, which you should absolutely order today 😗. This newsletter is a project by Jason Li, An Xiao Mina and Jennifer 8. Lee.