I did an quick scan of Chinese 成语 (Chéngyǔ) in a few hundred news articles and blogs and to my surprise there are actually a great usage of those even in news. I will scan 10.000+ pages to get better statistics but for now, here are a few of the top ones that I did get now. Note, there is always a debate if a set phrase is 成语 or not. I have used a standard list for this scan.


登峰造极 dēng fēng zào jí(of scholastic attainment or technical skill) reach great heights

高歌猛进 gāo gē měng jìn to advance singing loudly (idiom); triumphant progress

大快人心 dà kuài rén xīn to the great satisfaction of the people

称心如意 chèn xīn rú yì something after one´s own heart

百里挑一 bǎi lǐ tiāo yī one in a hundred / cream of the crop

匪夷所思 fěi yí suǒ sī fantastic / freak (accident etc)

风云人物 fēng yún rén wù a man of the hour

风口浪尖 fēng kǒu làng jiān where the wind and the waves are the fiercest / at the heart of the struggle

丰富多彩 fēng fù duō cǎi rich and varied

Cool, look forward to future posts about it.

I'm eagerly awaiting the list. I've been studying about 250 chengyu during the last few months using Anki with example sentences and Chinese definitions (+ a lot in Skritter), but even among the most frequent chengyu most are still missing.

I think that I can get one list up this weekend. I will have access to an more powerful server then to run this. Will run the same scan against films scrips as well since i feel that chengys are more frequently used in films than in newspapers. There are a lot of fun surprises with all of those scans. I just found out that the word a..hole is used much more often than e.g wife. No connections made;-)