Words, words, words

千言万語
sen.gen.ban.go

Literally: thousand – say – ten thousand – word

Alternately: Very many words. A vast number of words. Really quite a very large number of words indeed. Speech or writing that is long-winded, meandering, overdone, prolix, repetitive, tedious, verbose, and/or, well, wordy.

Notes: 千 and 万 are both common examples than can simply mean “a very large number or amount” rather than one or ten thousand specifically. There are quite a few yojijukugo that use them, either in the form 千A万B as above, or in the form XY千万, to express “a whole lot of [something].”

In this particular compound, 万 can also be pronounced as man without being strictly wrong, but ban is far more common and is the preferred reading.

This phrase comes to us from the poetic words, I mean works, of late Tang era poet Zheng Gu (鄭谷, Japanese Teikoku).

SenGenBanGoHon

An elementary-level Chinese textbook, appropriately enough!

About Confanity

I love the written word more than anything else I've had the chance to work with. I'm back in the States from Japan for grad school, but still studying Japanese with the hope of becoming a translator -- or writer, or even teacher -- as long as it's something language-related.
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