500 Common Chinese Idioms: An Annotated Frequency Dictionary

500 Common Chinese Idioms is the ideal tool for all intermediate to advanced learners of Chinese. Based on large corpora of authentic language data, it presents the 500 most commonly used Chinese idioms or chengyu, along with a variety of synonyms, antonyms and the most common structures, enabling the reader to make educated guesses about the meanings of hundreds of unfamiliar idioms.

Key features include:



the idiom in both simplified and traditional characters


a literal English translation and English equivalents


two suitable example sentences, plus explanations and usage notes


a Pinyin index and stroke order index.


This practical dictionary is suitable both for class use and independent study and will be of interest to students and teachers of Chinese alike.

The three co-authors are all involved in the teaching of Chinese as a second/foreign language.
Liwei Jiao is Lecturer in Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania. His publications include The Routledge Advanced Chinese Multimedia Course: Crossing Cultural Boundaries (co-authored with Kun-shan Carolyn Lee, Hsin-Hsin Liang and Julian Wheatley, Routledge 2009).

Cornelius C. Kubler is Stanfield Professor of Asian Studies at Williams College. He has authored or co-authored nine books and over 50 articles on Chinese language pedagogy and linguistics.

Weiguo Zhang is Emeritus Professor of Chinese Linguistics at Renmin University of China. He is currently Visiting Professor and Co-director of the Confucius Institute for Ireland at University College Dublin. He has published several books on computer language.

1. Introduction 2. Technical Terms Employed in the Dictionary. 3. Dictionary: Entries Arranged According to Frequency 4. Appendices Appendix A: Phonetic Index of the 500 Highest-Frequency Idioms Appendix B: Stroke Index of the 500 Highest-Frequency Idioms Appendix C: Frequency Chart of the First 1,000 Idioms According to The People’s Daily Newspaper Corpus Appendix D: Common Idioms not Included in the Body of the Dictionary. Appendix E: Additional References and Websites for Chinese Idioms