fears of trouble in the rear (idiom) / family worries (obstructing freedom of action) / worries about the future consequences / often in negative expressions, meaning "no worries about anything"
the meaning of sth / an explanation of the meaning of words or phrases / definition / an interpretation (of doctrine) / religious doctrine
民族主义
mín zú zhǔ yì
nationalism / national self-determination / principle of nationalism, the first of Dr Sun Yat-sen's 孫中山|孙中山 / Three Principles of the People 三民主義|三民主义 / (at the time, meaning parity between China and the great powers) / racism
lost / missing / to lose (sb in one's charge) / to get lost / to wander away / to lose (flavor, freshness, shape, hair, one's good looks etc) / to lose meaning (in translation)
anapodoton (a saying in which the second part, uttered after a pause or totally left out, is the intended meaning of the allegory presented in the first part)
口风
kǒu fēng
meaning behind the words / what sb really means to say / one's intentions as revealed in one's words / tone of speech
弄懂
nòng dǒng
to make sense of / to grasp the meaning of / to figure out
(old) third person singular pronoun ("he" or "she") / second person singular pronoun ("you") / (May 4th period) third person singular feminine pronoun ("she") / (Classical Chinese) introductory particle with no specific meaning / (preceding a noun) that
heart and mouth at variance (idiom) / keeping one's real intentions to oneself / saying one thing but meaning sth different
望文生义
wàng wén shēng yì
lit. view a text and interpret (idiom) / to interpret word by word without understanding the meaning / a far-fetched interpretation
民权主义
mín quán zhǔ yì
democracy / civil liberties / principle of democracy, the second of Dr Sun Yat-sen's 孫中山|孙中山 / Three Principles of the People 三民主義|三民主义 / (at the time, meaning widespread popular involvement in affairs of state)
民生主义
mín shēng zhǔ yì
principle of people's livelihood, the third of Dr Sun Yat-sen's 孫中山|孙中山 / Three Principles of the People 三民主義|三民主义 / (at the time, meaning redistribution of wealth, self-sufficiency and internal trade)
旧瓶装新酒
jiù píng zhuāng xīn jiǔ
lit. new wine in old bottles / fig. new concepts in an old framework / (loan idiom from Matthew 9:17, but fig. meaning is opposite)
言近旨远
yán jìn zhǐ yuǎn
simple words with a profound meaning (idiom)
郢书燕说
Yǐng shū Yān shuō
lit. Ying writes a letter and Yan reads it / fig. to misinterpret the original meaning / to pile up errors / refers to the letter from capital 郢[Ying3] of 楚[Chu3] in which the inadvertent words "hold up the candle" are mistaken by the minister of 燕[Yan1] as "promote the wise"
大有文章
dà yǒu wén zhāng
some deeper meaning in this / more to it than meets the eye / there's sth behind all this
(precise meaning unknown, relates to iron) / variant of 協|协[xie2]
假借义
jiǎ jiè yì
the meaning of a phonetic loan character 假借字[jia3 jie4 zi4] acquired from a similar-sounding word (e.g. 而[er2] originally meant "beard" but acquired the meaning "and")
a reading of a written Chinese word derived from a synonym (typically, a vernacular synonym) (e.g. in Mandarin, 投子[tou2 zi5] may be pronounced as its synonym 色子[shai3 zi5], and in Wu dialects, 二 / is pronounced as its synonym 兩|两 / "liahn") / to pronounce a word using such a reading / (Japanese linguistics) kun-reading, a pronunciation of a kanji derived from a native Japanese word that matches its meaning rather than from the pronunciation of the character in a Sinitic language at the time it was imported from China (Note: A kun-reading of a character is distinguished from its on-reading(s) 音讀|音读[yin1 du2]. For example, 山 / has a kun-reading "yama" and an on-reading "san".)
compound word such as 教室[jiao4 shi4] or 國家|国家[guo2 jia1], whose meaning is related to the component hanzi, unlike compounds such as 玫瑰[mei2 gui1]
衍声复词
yǎn shēng fù cí
compound word, such as 玫瑰[mei2gui1] or 咖啡[ka1fei1], whose meaning is unrelated to the individual characters (Note: These characters are often not used independently in modern Chinese.)
yì