ZH Chinese · neutral · 3 of 5
井底之蛙
Pinyin. jǐng dǐ zhī wā
cautionary, or cutting
Word by word
well · bottom · GEN · frog
Idiomatic sense
A person of narrow experience, who takes the patch of sky at the mouth of the well for the whole sky. It is a caution, or a slight. It says the person's view is small because their world has been small.
It is not a compliment about being the expert of a niche. A specialist who knows the limits of their field is not this frog. The frog does not know there is a sea.
Examples
老守着自己的圈子，难免做井底之蛙。
Stay inside one circle and your sky shrinks to the size of a well.
别做井底之蛙，出去看看。
Don't keep such a small sky. Go and look.
Equivalents
Marks say how far the other phrase travels with this one. How to read them.
- exact
井の中の蛙
The frog in the well, and Japanese often completes it 大海を知らず, who does not know the ocean. Same image, same judgment. The Japanese phrase is the usual loan of this figure.
- partial
a big fish in a small pond
Status inside a limited world. The fish may know the pond is small, and may like being large there. The frog does not know the sea exists. The overlap is only the small world.
- partial
ein beschränkter Horizont
A limited horizon. Abstract, and accurate. It is not a stock animal phrase.
- none
An obvious fact nobody mentions. Different job. Listed so a large animal in a set phrase is not drafted in by mistake.
Notes
The story this phrase points at is the frog in a collapsed well in Zhuangzi, Autumn Floods. That frog cannot imagine the sea. The four-character wording 井底之蛙 is the later set phrase. This entry does not cite an edition.
The traditional characters of this particular phrase match the simplified ones.
Sources
- Modern set phrase. The Zhuangzi frog is named as the story it points at, and is not quoted. Wording is original.