📖 Meaning
This idiom describes things that appear or happen again and again in an endless stream. It is often used for events, phenomena, or problems that keep surfacing one after another. The tone can be either neutral or mildly negative, depending on what is emerging.
📜 Origin Story
The phrase is a modern literary formation rather than a classical quotation, and it is most commonly associated with the writings of the early twentieth-century intellectual Li Dazhao. In his essay "The Postwar Trend of World Currents," Li Dazhao discussed the social upheavals following World War I and predicted that the laboring classes would produce great numbers of unemployed people. He wrote that unemployed people had already begun to appear everywhere, one group after another, using the expression "层见迭出" to convey the relentless succession of this phenomenon. The idiom combines the imagery of layered, repeated seeing with the idea of things emerging time and again, and it has since become a standard way to describe recurring events in modern written Chinese.
💡 Example Usage
今年以来，这类产品质量问题已层见迭出，引起了监管部门的高度重视。
Since the start of this year, problems of this kind in product quality have appeared one after another, drawing close attention from the regulators.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 层见迭出
- Pinyin: céng chū dié jiàn
- Literal Translation: layer, appear, repeatedly, emerge
- Category: Condition
- Characters: 4