"Mushroom" is a Chinese word whose pinyin is "mógu". In Hanyu Pinyin, the tones of "蘑菇" are "yinping" and "yangping", which correspond to the first and second tones in Hanyu Pinyin. Hanyu Pinyin is a syllabic script used in modern Chinese that uses consonants, rhymes and tones to represent the pronunciation of a syllable.

The consonants represent the consonant phonemes at the beginning of a syllable, the rhymes represent the vowel phonemes and consonant phonemes in the middle of a syllable, and the tones represent the pitch of the syllable. In the pinyin of "mushroom", "mó" represents the yin-flat tone, which means the pitch of the syllable is between the fourth and fifth tones; "gu" represents the yang-flat tone, which means the pitch of the syllable is between the first and second tones. The word "gu" means "yangping", which means the pitch of the syllable is between the first and second tones.