Chengyu: Chinese idioms and the stories inside them

Chinese packs its wisdom into chengyu (成语): four-character idioms, usually with a story folded inside. Say 画蛇添足 — “draw a snake and add feet” — and you have not described a painting error; you have accused someone of ruining a finished thing by gilding it. The compressed story does the work of a paragraph.

There are tens of thousands of chengyu, many quoting classical texts two thousand years old. Learners do not need most of them. The thirteen below are the famous core — the ones children in China learn first, the ones that show up in speeches, headlines, and everyday chat. Each page tells the story, the modern meaning, and how to use the idiom without sounding like a book.

Some idioms are wordplay rather than story (the number idioms, the rhyme pairs). For those, and for regular vocabulary, browse the dictionary or the words in context collections.