A field reference of 1,200+ Hokkien, Cantonese, Malay and Tamil terms heard across Penang's hawker stalls — transliterated, translated, and re-checked on a stool every season by the Tourism Penang editorial team.
The glossary is not a scraped dictionary. Every entry is something a Tourism Penang writer was shouted at, whispered, or gestured towards while sitting on a low red stool somewhere on the island. Here is what you get in the full PDF.
More than half of Penang hawker vocabulary is Hokkien, often seasoned with Penang-specific twists that won't appear in a Taiwan or Singapore dictionary. We mark which.
From siu mei counters to Cantonese-style chee cheong fun, the Cantonese section covers the dishes you'll find down Lebuh Cintra and Pulau Tikus.
Terms you'll hear at a mamak after 10pm, at the morning pasar, and at Malay kueh stalls in Balik Pulau — written in Rumi with light pronunciation notes for English readers.
The smallest section, but a beloved one: the words that make a banana-leaf lunch in Little India make sense, including the etiquette terms that change the way your meal arrives.
A short taste from each language section. The full PDF runs to 1,200 terms, with pronunciation in Malay/Thai/Tamil scripts where useful, and a small note on which stall the term was first heard at.
Every term is collected the slow way: at a stall, on a low stool, with a notebook and a coffee. There is no scraping, no machine translation, and no copy-paste from a Taiwanese Hokkien dictionary. If we can't hear a hawker actually use the word in Penang, it doesn't go in.
Kah Wei started the glossary as a personal notebook in 2018, after a friend visiting from KL asked why a Penang koay teow th'ng tasted completely different from the same dish in Kuala Lumpur. The answer was in the dialect, the technique, and the way the stall auntie seasoned the broth — and none of it was on the internet.
Today the glossary is maintained by a small rotation of writers and one retired hawker-turned-contributor who goes by the pen name Uncle Cheah. Each entry passes through four checks before publication: a first recording at the stall, a transliteration review, a cross-check with a native speaker, and a re-visit every 12 months. If a stall has changed hands or a dish has been quietly retired, we mark the entry as historic rather than delete it — the word is still useful, even if the stall isn't.
We also keep a separate running list of words we haven't been able to verify — terms heard once at a pasar malam, behind a motorbike engine, half-swallowed by a thunderstorm. These are kept in a private editorial doc, not the public PDF. We'd rather publish 1,200 trustworthy terms than 3,000 approximate ones.
“The glossary doesn't try to teach you to speak Hokkien. It tries to teach you to hear it — so the next time someone at a stall shouts something your way, you understand the menu, the mood, and the joke.”
— Lim Kah Wei, editor & founder
Named in Best Local Travel Voices 2024 as one of three Malaysian destination sites — with the glossary singled out as “the field reference the rest of the industry quietly borrows from.”
Recognised as a third-party information source since 2022. Used in orientation packs for visiting press and conference delegates.
Use the glossary as their on-the-day reference for hawker stops and as a welcome amenity in-room, alongside the Penang Planner.
Distributed in 2024 across six continents. The glossary excerpt is the most-photographed page in the planner, by reader report.
Best Niche Travel Publication 2023 — Malaysian Association of Tourism Writers.
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