外甥打燈籠──照舅, "a nephew carrying a lantern lights the way for his uncle", is the xiehouyu (歇后语, 歇後語) most often given as a pun: 照舅 sounds like 照舊, "as before", in Mandarin. In Cantonese it does not. The Chinese University of Hong Kong's Cantonese pronunciation database reads 舅 as kau5 and 舊 as gau6, and of 256 distinct pun pairs that are exact homophones in Putonghua, we found about four in ten that are not exact homophones in Cantonese.
A xiehouyu is a two-part saying: in the words of Taiwan's Ministry of Education dictionary, the first half works like a premise and the second half like an explanation, and the second half is the point. Most of them are not sound puns at all.
Open Taiwan's ministry dictionary and the sound puns are few
The Ministry of Education's revised Mandarin dictionary (重編國語辭典修訂本) defines 歇後語 as 「一種漢語特有的隱語」, a kind of covert saying it describes as peculiar to Chinese, and gives 十五個吊桶──七上八下 and 姜太公釣魚──願者上鉤 as examples. We searched its definitions and found 305 headwords labelled as xiehouyu. In the opening of each definition, only 35 mention a pun at all, with 諧, 雙關 or 同音, about one in nine.
The rest are not all plain metaphors. When we read 30 of the other 270 at random, between 11 and 13 turned on a phrase read two ways, literally and as an idiom, as in 麵杖吹火──一竅不通: a rolling pin has no hole to blow through, and 一竅不通 also means knowing nothing about something. The others work by picture and point, the way 十五個吊桶──七上八下 pictures fifteen buckets in a well, seven going up and eight going down, to mean a mind in turmoil.
The dictionary is a historical one, and its xiehouyu lean on Ming and Qing fiction: 146 of the 305 cite a named work in the opening of the entry, most often 金瓶梅 (32 times), then 醒世姻緣傳 (17), 紅樓夢 (12), 兒女英雄傳 (12) and 儒林外史 (11). A public compilation of 14,032 sayings, of unknown provenance, marks a pun with a short bracket in about 1,091 of them, 7.8%.
Trace 歇後 back to the Tang and it names a verse style
The word 歇後, "resting the end", is old. The biography of the Tang chief minister Zheng Qi in the Old Book of Tang says 「綮善爲詩，多侮劇刺時，故落格調，時號鄭五歇後體」: his verse mocked the times and broke the rules of form, and people called it Zheng Wu's 歇後 style. When he was made chief minister, people said 「歇後鄭五作宰相，時事可知矣」. The same chapter dates his death to 899.
That is a verse style attached to one man, not the two-part saying, and the text does not use the three-character term 歇後語. We could not establish when that term was first used. RTHK's guide to Chinese, in a 2019 archived copy, puts the form later: 「宋元時代，戲曲中開始出現大量與今天形式差不多的歇後語」, sayings much like today's began to appear in quantity in Song and Yuan drama, with an example from the play 尋親記, 買乾魚放生, buying dried fish to set free, for not knowing life from death.
Look up 照舅 and the bracket can point either way
Popular lists mark a pun by putting one of the two characters in brackets, and they do not agree on which. The Ministry's dictionary uses no brackets. Its entry for 外甥打燈籠 gives the punchline as 照舅, the literal word, and names 舊 as the sound it echoes. Its entry for 和尚打傘 does the opposite, writing the intended phrase 無法無天 and explaining that 法 stands for 髮, the hair a monk does not have. Across its explained puns, the dictionary writes the intended word in about 19 and the literal one in about 12, and explains the swap in prose either way.
Strip the gloss from 過河拆橋 and an ordinary idiom is left
Some sayings in popular xiehouyu lists are single idioms with a meaning attached, such as 過河拆橋, 畫蛇添足, 騎虎難下 and 快刀斬亂麻. Each is a main entry in the Ministry's dictionary of idioms (成語典), and the revised dictionary labels 麻雀雖小 a proverb. Our guide to the idioms that end a game of chengyu jielong covers that form. The line is not always sharp: the idioms dictionary lists 泥牛入海, a clay ox walking into the sea, while RTHK gives 泥牛入海, 永無消息, gone without news, as an early xiehouyu.
Search our own list for 哑巴 and almost a third of it comes back
Our xiehouyu dictionary said it held 146 common, verified sayings. We checked each against the Ministry's 305 and the 14,032-entry compilation. Only 29 were listed by the Ministry as xiehouyu. Forty-six, almost a third, began with 哑巴, a word for a person who cannot speak that many readers now consider offensive. Only 3 of the Ministry's 305 begin that way. Of those 46, 35 were found in neither collection, against 13 of the other 100 entries. Ten more were idioms or proverbs with a meaning attached, and one bracketed pun, 尽是鬼(擂), was no pun in any reading. Until 2 October 2026 its search also found only 13 of its own sayings when they were typed in Traditional Chinese, including none of the examples its Traditional-Chinese instructions gave. The list now holds 126 sayings, 81 of them listed by the Ministry and the rest found in the compilation, each marked as a sound pun, a double meaning or a metaphor, and its search finds every entry in Simplified, Taiwan or Hong Kong characters.
Read the puns aloud in Cantonese and many miss
The public compilation has 1,067 bracketed pun pairs. Read with a Putonghua pronunciation library, 743 of them are exact homophones, which reduce to 256 distinct pairs of characters. We looked up every character in the Chinese University of Hong Kong's Cantonese database and counted a pair as exact in Cantonese if any reading listed for one character matched any reading listed for the other.
| In Cantonese | Distinct pairs | Sayings |
|---|---|---|
| Exact homophones | 149 | 422 |
| Same except for tone | 12 | 26 |
| Different | 92 | 290 |
| Not in the database | 3 | 5 |
Of the 253 pairs the database can read, 104, or 41%, are not exact puns in Cantonese. Matching on any listed reading is generous, because some matches run through a colloquial reading, so 41% is a floor. Among the sayings in our own list, 冻(动)了心 fails (dung3 against dung6) and so does 投机(鸡)取巧 (gei1 against gai1), while 孔夫子搬家──净是书(输) survives, both read syu1. RTHK's own note on 外甥打燈籠 says the pun works because 「普通話中舅與舊同音」, in Putonghua the two are the same sound. We tested Cantonese only, not Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka or any other Chinese language.
Reverse the test and some puns work better in Cantonese
和尚打傘──無法無天 is not an exact pun in Putonghua, where 法 is fǎ and 髮 is fà. In Taiwan's Mandarin the Ministry's dictionary reads 髮 as ㄈㄚˇ, fǎ, so the two match, and in Cantonese both are faat3. Running the test in reverse, the libraries read 45 bracketed pairs in the compilation as exact in Cantonese but not in Putonghua; we did not check those against the CUHK database.
RTHK also records sayings whose pun only works in Cantonese. 沙灣燈籠──何府, which it gives as a Guangdong saying, stands for 何苦, why bother, and the database reads 府 and 苦 both as fu2. Its other example, the 1950s Hong Kong saying 新澤西 for 食水深, a deep draught and Cantonese slang for overcharging, was already forgotten when RTHK wrote it down.
