5 Singapore words you might not fully understand but still uses them anyway

Living in Singapore is really cool. I mean besides the facts that we are clean, safe, and all the other blah blah blah world no.1 things that make me really proud, I also embrace on our whole multi-culture and multi-racial thing. Especially when you visit a hawker centre and you can order Malay food, Chinese food, and these days even Korean or Japanese food.

But, there is one thing about Singapore that I really can't stand. (Okay, maybe more than one, like kiasu Singaporeans, self centred, self entitled, etc etc, but that is another problem for another time.)
It is how crazy our language can be.

Image source: TheSmartLocal

I really didn't know that the word "kopitiam" is actually half Malay and half Hokkien. It is as if English itself is not difficult enough to get it right, we also have our owns set of Singlish and to make things worst, we also have some very strange words of unknown origin but we use it anyway. (Okay lah, maybe you know and I do not. Do enlighten me if you do okay?)

1. Wah Lau 

Okay lah, this is the easier one. Wah Lau is probably Hokkien which means "My Father". So I believe this is like a hokkien version of "Oh my god" since people go to church also call the priests - father. God, priest, father, same same I guess. 

But it gets a little more confusing when you have variables like Wah Lan, Wah Biang. I know "lan" is like dick but what is biang? 

2. Mum Mum 

Mad awesome Galaktobureko from Aryaa! 

Mum mum which you probably know it means food. Neither does it sound like a sound nor an action to me. I am very sure it doesn't means mother in anyway. (unless it is your dad who is telling you this. :x) So why is food mum mum?

3. Orh Orh/ Gao Gao 

I think this is not too hard either. Orh Orh / Gao Gao should be quite commonly understood as sleep. Orh is like when you reply a text message acknowledging things but Orh Orh doesn't means ok twice.  (strange) It means sleep. Is that Hokkien? I am pretty sure Gao Gao is like 睡觉's 觉 in Cantonese.

4. Void Deck 

Image source: ghettosingapore

We all know it is like English for sure. We also know what/where it is, but I bet you didn't know Void Deck is an exclusive term to Singapore. Of course, Got Source Got Talk - Wikipedia. Cool right?

5. Pom Pom 

Seriously, this is the whole reason why I wrote this article. I told my friend about the word pom pom and she has no idea what it was. We had a very long heated debate on wtf is pom pom, the origin, what are the other forms of this word, is it from hokkien? Cantonese? Thai? What is the past tense? I almost died. But according to old wisdom from my mum, it is just the sound of water. Which my friend ain't very convinced.


These 5 words are just some of the many "Singapore Words" that we use it so often that you might not even question yourself about it. What are some of the other words that should make it to the list? In other news, some other 19 luckier words actually made it into the Oxford English Dictionary.  So does that means I can now use these words during my O level? Does that means that these words are now English and not Singlish?