🧩 Hanmoji Puzzles 🧩

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09 Quit horsing around with those ghosts 🐎👻

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09 Quit horsing around with those ghosts 🐎👻

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

Jason, An & Jennifer
Oct 5, 2022
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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!


🧩 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.)

⏳

⏳

⏳

🫢 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?

A film poster where two Asian men are leaning towards each other playfully
Image from Wikipedia.

Enjoyed this week’s puzzle? Share it with a friend and see how they fare 🧐

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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 🇨🇦.


That’s it this week’s 🧩 Hanmoji Puzzles 🧩! Subscribe to receive next week’s puzzle and please forward this email to friends so we can continue this puzzling endeavor.


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.

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