No wonder the parents acted that way, she said. They were just being kia-su (afraid to lose out).
Source: wiktionary
Kiasu
//ˈkjɑːsuː//
Synonyms for "kiasu"
Ranked by relevance and common usage.
Related word relations
OpenGloss and ConceptNet supply richer edges like generalizations, collocations, and derivations.
Translations
3 translations across 3 languages.
Chinese
1 entries- 驚輸 /惊输 adj (afraid of losing out)
Chinese Mandarin
1 entries- 怕輸 /怕输 adj (afraid of losing out)
Malay
1 entries- takut kalah adj (afraid of losing out)
Sample sentences
8 total sentences available.
The kia-si/kia-su ("afraid to die/afraid to lose") attitude of the Totalisator Boards in Malaysia and Singapore is deplorable.
Source: wiktionary
We often see a bus with commuters practically spilling out of the front door and crowding at the exit door. But beyond that, a vacuum prevails, says a reader. The kia-su attitude is the reason for this, says the reader, and most of the culprits are students from secondary schools and junior colleges.
Source: wiktionary
The story now going around is that the distributors of Suzuki cars will take over the failed distributorship of Korea's Kia cars. According to one wag, the new distributorship could call itself "Kia-Su Motors". For the uninitiated, kiasu means "afraid to lose" in the Hokkien dialect.
Source: wiktionary
Showing 4 of 8 available sentences.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.