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Enjoy your stay at Wiktionary! Feel free to reach out if you need formatting help. Ultimateria (talk) 05:14, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

wor in Singlish?

Hello. wor is a particle from Cantonese 喎 (wo3) used in Hong Kong English - I wonder whether or not it is also used in Singlish? (or maybe Manglish?) There's some usage of such on a few forums in .sg and r/singapore, but I want to see if that's really the case - some of them doesn't make that much sense to me. A common collocation would be "I don't know wor". – wpi (talk) 05:50, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

P.S. what#Particle seems to carry the same usage as wor (or perhaps one of its senses). – wpi (talk) 05:52, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

喎／㖞 (wo³) doesn't see much usage in Singapore. I'm unfamiliar with it, as it appears to be a rare expression from Cantonese. I assume it is used among Cantonese Singaporeans. Since Mandarin and Hokkien are the dominant varieties of Chinese in Singapore, Cantonese discourse markers are less likely to enter mainstream usage in Singlish.

Note that there is a different wor, apparently from Mandarin 嚄 (ǒ) according to Jack Tsen-Ta Lee's A Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English. This wor is used as an expression of surprise, as in “Wah, you not bad wor!” (Wow, you're not bad!). This is, however, quite uncommon in Singlish.

MiltonLibraryAssistant (talk) 10:32, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. I think this "surprise" wor would be too much of a coincidence if it is not the Cantonese 喎／㖞 (sense 2, "realization") - Mandarin 嚄 also expresses "surprise" but it is more like an exclamation particle like English "wow" rather than a sentence final particle, and the phonetics does not match that well. There's also a few particles like meh#Etymology 2, mah (I don't think this is from Cantonese though, can't be used by itself in Cantonese), hor (sense 2 overlaps with HKE hor which is from 嗬 (ho²)) that are from Cantonese, so I wouldn't rule out the possibility entirely.

I do agree that wor seems to be quite rare in Singlish though, so I'll keep that in mind when I create the entry. – wpi (talk) 10:59, 6 October 2023 (UTC)