Look up 5,057 Chinese idioms by character, pinyin or English, fill in a missing character, or play idiom chains. 27 have full origins and usage.
Chinese Chengyu Idiom Finder (成语词典)
Chinese-English dictionary data: CC-CEDICT, CC BY-SA 4.0.
How to use
Enter a chengyu or keyword
Type the full idiom (画蛇添足), a single character (画), pinyin (huà), or English (snake).
Read the full breakdown
Each entry shows literal meaning, figurative meaning, classical origin story, and modern usage example.
Browse partial matches
Keyword searches return multiple related idioms for comparison.
Learn by random
Hit "Random" each day for a new chengyu — a delightful way to grow your idiom bank.
Chengyu: A Thousand Years of Chinese Wisdom, Compressed
Chengyu (成语) are Chinese four-character fixed expressions, the vast majority sourced from historical anecdotes, fables, and classical literature spanning the Warring States period through the late imperial era. Each chengyu typically compresses an entire narrative or life lesson into four syllables — "画蛇添足" (paint snake add feet) tells the whole story of overdoing a good thing in four characters.
Where the stories come from
Many chengyu point back to a passage you can still read: 守株待兔 to the Han Feizi, 指鹿为马 and 后来居上 to the Shiji, 狐假虎威 and 画蛇添足 to the Zhanguo Ce, 不可思议 to the Buddhist Vimalakirti Sutra. Each card here quotes the source line where there is one, and says plainly when the earliest source has not been established.
Chengyu in Singapore and Malaysian Mandarin
Chengyu are part of everyday written Chinese in Singapore and Malaysia too — in news headlines, business reports and speeches — with familiar phrases like 众所周知 (as is well known), 与时俱进 (move with the times) and 迎难而上 (tackle difficulty head-on).
There are 5,057 idioms here. 27 have full cards with their literal reading, meaning, source and an example; the rest come from CC-CEDICT, with pinyin and an English gloss.
Four characters is a convention, not a rule
Many chengyu compress a story from a named classical text: 守株待兔 comes from the Han Feizi, where a farmer puts down his plough to guard the stump, hoping for another rabbit.
Chengyu need not have four characters: 莫须有 has three. Four is simply the most common form.
Some are later summaries of older passages: the Huainanzi tells the frontier man's story, and what he says is "how do we know this is not a blessing?" The four-character 塞翁失马 came later.
The Shiji supplies several: 指鹿为马 comes from the Basic Annals of Qin Shi Huang, and 后来居上 from Ji An complaining that officials were promoted like stacked firewood, the last to arrive going on top.
Many chengyu feature animal protagonists, reflecting how ancient Chinese observed nature: deer (鹿死谁手), horses (老马识途), foxes (狐假虎威), dragons (画龙点睛).
Hu Shi's 1917 essay on literary reform told writers to drop stock phrases (务去滥调套语) and to use no allusions (不用典), the very material many chengyu are made of. Chengyu remain a core part of written Chinese all the same.
Buddhist scripture contributed too: 不可思议 renders the Sanskrit acintya, as in the "inconceivable liberation" (不可思议解脱) of the Vimalakirti Sutra.
Many chengyu include numbers for rhetorical contrast: 一举两得 (1+2), 三心二意 (3+2), 四面楚歌 (4 sides), 五光十色 (5+10), 千变万化 (1000+10000), 万事如意 (10000 things).
A classical source does not fix the modern sense: 后来居上 began as Ji An's complaint about unfair promotion and is now mostly praise for a latecomer who overtakes.
Pairs with HSK Vocabulary and Character Frequency — the core Chinese-language learning toolset.
Frequently Asked Questions
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5,057. 27 have full cards with a literal reading, meaning, source and example, and say 出处待考 where no source is settled. The rest come from CC-CEDICT, with pinyin and an English gloss, but no origin or example.
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Put a ? for each character you cannot recall, as in 画?添? or ?蛇??. Either script works.
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成语接龙 is a word game: the next idiom must open with the character the last one ended on. Press Chain on a result to list the idioms that do, then those opening on the same sound, which many players accept.
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Yes. Enter "snake" to find snake-themed idioms, "hua" to find any with hua in the pinyin, or the full Chinese (画蛇添足) for an exact match.
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Yes. The tool indexes simplified characters but all content (meaning, origin, usage) includes traditional translation. Traditional input is matched.
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Not strictly. Some have three characters, such as 莫须有; four is simply the most common form. This tool lists four-character chengyu only.
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The most effective method is to remember the story, not the characters. 塞翁失马 is forgettable as four characters but unforgettable as "old man at the frontier loses his horse, horse returns with wild horse, son falls off and breaks leg, broken leg saves him from conscription".
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Depends. In professional writing, misuse damages credibility. In casual speech, usually forgiven. The most common error is confusing similar-sounding idioms — e.g. 不学无术 (unlearned) vs 不务正业 (not minding one's proper work).
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Yes. Japanese 四字熟語 (yojijukugo) and Korean 사자성어 (sajaseong-eo) both borrowed extensively from Chinese chengyu, preserving the characters with different pronunciations. Meanings mostly match, with some semantic drift.
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Public domain. Chengyu sourced from classical texts (Shiji, Zhanguo Ce, Huainanzi, Liezi, Han Feizi) all well past copyright. Meanings and modern usage drawn from common-knowledge consensus across open dictionaries and textbooks.
Method & sources
How it computes
27 idioms have full cards held in ChengyuKernel, with each script, pinyin, literal reading, meaning, source and example; source lines say 出处待考 where none was confirmed. Beneath them are 5,057 four-character idioms (5,055 from CC-CEDICT, two from the cards) with pinyin and an English gloss, searchable by character, pinyin or English, by a pattern such as 画?添?, or as a chain from an idiom's last character.
What this tool implements
- Corrected 2026-10-21: the kernel's 'origin' field was written as quotations, and many were invented. 塞翁失马 was quoted as 「塞翁失馬,焉知非福」 from the Huainanzi, which says 「此何遽不為福乎」. 画蛇添足, 对牛弹琴, 狐假虎威, 叶公好龙, 指鹿为马 and 愚公移山 had similar invented lines. 17 entries now quote the passage as read on Wikisource. 4 have no confirmable source and say 出处待考: 马到成功, 一帆风顺, 锦上添花, 雪中送炭. 名副其实, credited to 楚辞·九辩, which does not contain it, also says 出处待考. The 新序 compiler is now Liu Xiang (it said 'Han Wen'), and the Book of Jin is dated to its Tang compilation.
- Page prose corrected in all three languages: about 50,000 chengyu, '~95% are four characters', '~800 from the Shiji', Shang-Zhou origins, '30-40% fewer in Singapore and Taiwan curricula', 与时俱进 from the 1980s and 500-3,000 idioms per speaker were unsourced and are gone. The Lu Xun and Hu Shi line is now Hu Shi's own 1917 rules, 务去滥调套语 and 不用典.
- Merged 2026-11-03: /bilingual-idiom-search/ now redirects here. 54 of its 60 idioms were already in this list; four of the rest are sayings carried by the proverb dictionary and the classical-particles data, and the two CC-CEDICT lacks, 敏而好学 (論語·公冶長 5.15) and 雷霆万钧 (漢書 卷五十一, 賈山《至言》), are new checked cards, each quotation read on zh.wikisource. The list is 5,057: 5,055 from CC-CEDICT and those two.
Sources
- 《韓非子·五蠹》, Chinese Wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/韓非子/五蠹
- 《史記》卷六〈秦始皇本紀〉 and 卷一百二十〈汲鄭列傳〉, Chinese Wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/史記/卷006
- 《戰國策》齊策二、楚策一、楚策四 (士禮居叢書本), Chinese Wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/戰國策
- 《淮南子·人間訓》, Chinese Wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/淮南子/人間訓
- 《列子·湯問》, 《呂氏春秋》卷二十四〈自知〉, 《新序·雜事》卷五, 《晉書》束皙傳 and 樂廣傳, Chinese Wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/列子/湯問篇
- 《禮記》曲禮上 and 中庸, 《孟子·公孫丑上》, Chinese Wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/禮記/中庸
- 《牟子理惑論》, 《太平廣記》卷二一一, 《維摩詰所說經》不思議品, Chinese Wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/牟子理惑論
- 胡適〈文學改良芻議〉(1917), Chinese Wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/文學改良芻議
Abridged — the full review record for this tool runs longer than the list above.
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