摸鱼mō yú

Touching fish (slacking off)

mō yú zhōng, wù rǎo.摸鱼中，勿扰。Slacking off. Do not disturb.

摸鱼, “touching fish”, means slacking off at work or school: chatting, scrolling or reading when you should be working. It is one of the most common words of Chinese office life.

Took off: 2020
Started in: Office slang from an old idiom
Today: Now everyday Chinese

What it means

It comes from the idiom 浑水摸鱼, “to catch fish in muddy water”, which means to take advantage of a mess. In the slang, the mess is a busy office where nobody notices that you are not working.

Someone who does it is a 摸鱼人. A close word is 划水, “to paddle”: doing the minimum in a group task.

How people use it

It is everyday Chinese. You say it about yourself to friends and coworkers your age: 上班摸鱼, 摸了一下午鱼, “slacked off all afternoon”. The verb and the noun can split, as in that second example.

Do not say it to your boss about your own work, unless the two of you joke that way.

亮亮

在干嘛？
zài gàn má?
What are you up to?
上班摸鱼，你呢？
shàng bān mō yú, nǐ ne?
Slacking off at work. You?
我也是，老板今天出差了
wǒ yě shì, lǎo bǎn jīn tiān chū chāi le
Same. The boss is away on a business trip.
那下班一起吃饭！
nà xià bān yì qǐ chī fàn!
Then let’s have dinner after work!

More examples

老板不在，大家都在摸鱼。
lǎo bǎn bú zài, dà jiā dōu zài mō yú.
The boss is out, so everyone’s slacking off.
今天开会的时候我摸了一小时鱼。
jīn tiān kāi huì de shí hou wǒ mō le yì xiǎo shí yú.
I slacked off for an hour in today’s meeting.

For the word itself and how to reply to it, see 摸鱼 in the slang dictionary.

Where it came from

摸鱼 was already an everyday word. In 2020 it became a buzzword: a Weibo blogger wrote a short 摸鱼哲学, “philosophy of slacking off”, and The Beijing News quoted it: get through life without trying too hard, and go easy on yourself and on others too.

The Beijing News covered it among the work words of 2020, next to 打工人. In 2021 a joke course by a Tsinghua University student, 摸鱼学导论, “an introduction to slacking off”, went viral, as The China Project reported.

The original. There is no single image; the word spread as text in posts and chats. The Beijing News looked at it among the work words of 2020. The Beijing News (in Chinese)