Moe

//ˈməʊ.eɪ// adj, adv, name, noun, verb, slang

adj, adv, name, noun, verb, slang ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Strong interest in, and especially fetishistic attraction towards, fictional characters in anime, manga, video games, and/or similar media. slang, uncountable

    "Someone who is pretty or beautiful isn't moe by definition. Moe characters don't always have to be younger girls, but it certainly helps! In fact, moe characters don't even have to be female! As long as they make you feel like you want to hug and protect them, that's enough!"

  2. 2
    Obsolete form of mow (“wry face, grimace”). alt-of, obsolete
  3. 3
    Initialism of Ministry of Education. abbreviation, alt-of, initialism
  4. 4
    Alternative letter-case form of MoE. alt-of
  5. 5
    Obsolete form of moa. alt-of, obsolete
Show 2 more definitions
  1. 6
    Initialism of mixture of experts. abbreviation, alt-of, initialism

    "GLaM [51] is an autoregressive mixture-of-experts (MoE) model with up to 1200B parameters."

  2. 7
    Initialism of margin of error. abbreviation, alt-of, initialism
Verb
  1. 1
    Obsolete form of moo. alt-of, obsolete
  2. 2
    Obsolete form of mow (“to make faces”). alt-of, obsolete
Adjective
  1. 1
    Cute, adorable. (of fictional characters in anime, manga, video games, and/or similar media) slang
Adverb
  1. 1
    Obsolete form of mo. alt-of, obsolete
  2. 2
    Obsolete form of more. alt-of, obsolete

    "Sing no more ditties, sing no moe."

Proper Noun
  1. 1
    A surname, possibly formed by abbreviation of Moses or another name beginning with "Mo-".
  2. 2
    A female given name from Japanese.
  3. 3
    A town in the Shire of Baw Baw and the City of Latrobe, south eastern Victoria, Australia.
  4. 4
    A male given name; Diminutive of Moses and Maurice.

Example

More examples

"Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a tiger by his toe, if he hollers let him go, eeny, meeny, miny, moe. My mother told me to catch the very best one and you are not it."

Etymology

Etymology 1

From Japanese 萌え (moe, “budding, sprouting”), imperfective or continuative form of 萌える (moeru, “to burst into bud, to sprout”).

Etymology 2

Variant forms.

Etymology 3

Clipping.

Etymology 4

From Japanese Moe (Moe); もえ (“moé”).

Related phrases

Moe Southfigure moe zokumoe anthropomorphismgiven namemoe sangyovideo game

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.