tofu dreg
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.42 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
3
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A poorly constructed building in China, or the shoddy material(s) used to construct it.
Example Sentences
- "No one asks about the shoddy “tofu-dregs engineering”; instead, we blindly accuse “running teacher Fan.” Nationalism is only a fig leaf for the feeble-minded, a tricky maneuver that prevents everyone from seeing the complete picture."
- "In the 2008 Sichuan earthquake several thousand school buildings collapsed, killing thousands of children and bringing the world's attention to the shoddy “tofu-dregs” buildings and rampant corruption that had skimmed the public funds ..."
- "Tan Zuoron, a writer who tried to document “shoddy tofu-dregs construction” that might have caused massive school-building collapses, was sentenced to prison."
- "[…] teachers, teaching assistants, and school nurses would have died in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 had the buildings not been made of tofu dregs."
- "For example, the Kunming-Luquan highway in Kunming, Yunnan Province, had become a “tofu dreg project.”"
- "Individual Chinese citizens explicitly criticized the Ministry of Railway, describing it with such disparaging terms as ‘asshole’ and ‘bastard,’ and described the high-speed train project as one of the ‘tofu-dreg projects (豆腐渣工程 in Mandarin),’ which referred to projects with poor [quality]."