kowtow

present singular third person kowtows · participle present kowtowing · participle past kowtowed · past kowtowed · alternative obsolete kotoo · alternative kotow · alternative ko-tow · alternative kow-tow

1. historicalintransitiveTo kneel and bow low enough to touch one’s forehead to the ground.

   When the weather turned cold, the tears that he shed would become frozen like veins; the blood on his forehead from kowtowing would also freeze and would not drip.

   2013, Wendy Swartz, Robert Ford Campany, Yang Lu, Jessey J. C. Choo, Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook, Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page 645

2. figurativelyintransitiveTo grovel, act in a very submissive manner; to show obeisance to (someone or something) in such a manner; to bow.

   I suppose you're going to be nice to Odie and kowtow to Jon and lick the mailman's boots! I don't like you already.

   1984 December 30, Jim Davis, Garfield (comic)

   1 more example

   The letter to Razin contained another thought that preoccupied Stalin in the first months after the war: the need to avoid “kowtowing to the West,” including showing “unwarranted respect” for the “military authorities of Germany.”

   2015, Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 265

3. intransitiveTo bow very deeply.

plural kowtows · alternative obsolete kotoo · alternative kotow · alternative ko-tow · alternative kow-tow

1. intransitiveThe act of kowtowing.

   Three elders dressed in their long silk ceremonial gowns perform the kowtow before the altar in their clan ancestral hall.

   1990, Hugh D. R. Baker, Hong Kong Images: People and Animals, Hong Kong University Press, →ISBN, page 93

   Synonyms: dogeza