📖 Meaning
A grown man should take a wife and start a family. It expresses the traditional expectation that once a man comes of age, marriage and settling down are his natural duty. It is often said by elders to urge a young man to wed.
📜 Origin Story
The phrase is most famously attested in Lao She's novel Rickshaw Boy (骆驼祥子), where a character scolds another by saying, '男大当娶，女大当聘，你六十九了，白活！' — a man should marry and a woman should be wed, and at sixty-nine you have lived in vain. It is a folk proverb in the parallel paired form common in Chinese village speech rather than the invention of one author. The underlying custom traces back to the ancient rite of capping (冠礼) that marked male adulthood and to the classical marriage rites recorded in the Book of Rites and the Rites of Zhou.
💡 Example Usage
男大当娶，你也该考虑成家的事了。
A grown man should marry — it's time you started thinking about settling down.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 男大当娶
- Pinyin: nán dà dāng qǔ
- Literal Translation: man, grown up, should, marry
- Category: Lifestyle
- Characters: 4