📖 Meaning
A vivid description of loud, mournful wailing and crying as if spirits and ghosts themselves were weeping. It conveys an atmosphere of extreme grief, terror, or anguish with piercing, mournful cries. It is interchangeable with the more common form 神号鬼哭.
📜 Origin Story
This idiom belongs to the family of folk expressions comparing unearthly sounds to the cries of supernatural beings. While it lacks a single definitive literary origin, such imagery appears throughout classical Chinese literature, from Tang dynasty poetry to Ming dynasty vernacular novels, where battlefields and scenes of catastrophe were described as filled with ghostly wails. Over time the phrase became a stock descriptor for any scene of overwhelming sorrow or terror.
💡 Example Usage
战场上尸横遍野，神号鬼泣，惨不忍睹。
Corpses covered the battlefield amid wails fit for spirits and ghosts, a sight too gruesome to behold.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 神号鬼泣
- Pinyin: shén hào guǐ qì
- Literal Translation: spirits, wail, ghosts, weep
- Category: Emotion
- Characters: 4