📖 Meaning
To keep craning and stretching one's head to peer around. It describes someone who hesitates and watches cautiously before acting, or behaves furtively as if harboring a guilty conscience.
📜 Origin Story
The idiom first appears in chapter 24 of Journey to the West (西游记), the Ming dynasty novel by Wu Cheng'en. In the scene, a character who should be tending the cooking fire cannot focus and repeatedly pokes his head out to look around, vividly capturing a restless, distracted state. Later usage expanded the image of craning and peeking to denote hesitant, indecisive observation or the guilty, suspicious manner of someone with something to hide. The phrase also appears in the Ming dynasty novel Ping Shan Leng Yan (平山冷燕), showing it had entered common literary use.
💡 Example Usage
别在门口伸头探脑了，有事就进来说。
Stop poking your head around the doorway — if you have something to say, come in and say it.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 伸头探脑
- Pinyin: shēn tóu tàn nǎo
- Literal Translation: stretch, head, probe, brain
- Category: Action
- Characters: 4