📖 Meaning
The speech of swallows and the song of orioles. Originally used to depict the beauty of spring, it later came to describe the melodious and pleasant voices of young women talking and laughing.
📜 Origin Story
From the Yuan dynasty playwright Guan Hanqing's play 'Golden Thread Pool' (《金线池》). In the prologue, he describes graceful, light figures fit to be painted on a green screen, with speech like a flowing oriole and a voice like a swallow, then asks rhetorically how such swallow speech and oriole song could ever be captured in paint.
💡 Example Usage
春日里，几位姑娘在花园中说笑，燕语莺声，好不热闹。
On a spring day, several young women chatted and laughed in the garden, their voices as melodious as swallows and orioles, full of liveliness.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 燕语莺声
- Pinyin: yàn yǔ yīng shēng
- Literal Translation: swallow's speech, oriole's song
- Category: Quality
- Characters: 4