📖 Meaning
Tasks are easy to accomplish yet yield great results. It describes a situation where minimal effort produces outsized benefit, usually thanks to a good method or favorable conditions.
📜 Origin Story
This idiom has no single classical source text and is best understood as a variant expression of the more common 事半功倍, which traces back to the Mencius (孟子·公孙丑上) where King Xuan of Qi is advised that governing at a time of favorable circumstance yields double results. 事捷功倍 preserves the same contrast between ease of effort and scale of outcome, swapping 半 for 捷 to emphasize swiftness. It circulated mainly through later literary and everyday usage rather than being tied to one historical anecdote.
💡 Example Usage
采用这种新方法处理问题，往往能事捷功倍。
By adopting this new method to tackle the problem, one often achieves great results with little effort.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 事捷功倍
- Pinyin: shì jié gōng bèi
- Literal Translation: matter, easy, merit, double
- Category: Method
- Characters: 4