📖 Meaning
A metaphor for a woman of outstanding beauty and talent who marries a man vastly inferior to her. The splendid phoenix represents the noble, gifted bride, while the common crow symbolizes the coarse, unworthy husband. It highlights a painfully mismatched union in which the bride far outshines the groom.
📜 Origin Story
No single authoritative source is recorded for this idiom; it circulated as a folk and literary image drawn from the contrast between the mythical phoenix, a symbol of nobility and beauty, and the common crow, a bird of ill omen and coarseness. Over successive dynasties poets and storytellers used the image to lament brilliant women wed to unworthy men. The phrase crystallized in vernacular fiction and drama, where it served as a stock lament for mismatched marriages. Because it arose from accumulated literary usage rather than a single canonical text, it is treated as having no fixed origin.
💡 Example Usage
她的才貌众人皆赞，却嫁给那样的人，真是采凤随鸦。
Everyone praised her talent and beauty, yet she married such a man—truly a phoenix following a crow.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 采凤随鸦
- Pinyin: cǎi fèng suí yā
- Literal Translation: colorful phoenix, follows, crow
- Category: Status
- Characters: 4