Chinese idiom lookup
Look up Chinese idioms and Hong Kong colloquialisms—~31k idioms with meaning, source, and examples, plus HK slang; Mandarin pinyin and Hong Kong Jyutping included.
Exact phrase match first, then fuzzy search on text, meaning, or romanization.
About idioms
Chinese idioms (成语 chengyu) are set phrases or short sentences in the lexicon. They have fixed wording and structure, carry a stable meaning, and function as a single unit in a sentence.
Many idioms have been handed down from classical usage; their wording often differs from modern Mandarin and may encode a story or historical allusion.
Idioms are ready-made expressions, close to collocations and proverbs but not identical. Most come from written tradition and belong to a more literary register.
In form, idioms are usually established four-character phrases whose characters should not be swapped casually; they make speech and writing more vivid, concise, and pictorial.
Traditional Chinese forms are converted at build time (OpenCC). English glosses are machine-translated offline for reference only—not live translation on each query.
Hong Kong colloquialisms
HK slang comes mainly from everyday Cantonese—often with English loanwords—and sounds direct and informal. It fits chats, local culture, and street speech rather than the literary register of classical idioms.
HK slang here is curated by BeanCloud from everyday Cantonese, local sayings, and public dictionary glosses—not one downloadable corpus. Slang matches show an amber badge.