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rè sōu (热搜) — “hot search.” Not the headlines; the replies underneath.

The Resou Dictionary

Words the translate button gives up on

Slang the Chinese internet uses every day, defined in English and cited from real comment sections. Numbered, filed, and never published without receipts.

ENTRY #000 热搜 rè sōu “trending, with a hand on the dial” RESOU is 热搜 in pinyin: rè sōu, the hot search. English has “trending” — a number that happens to you. 热搜 is a place. You can be put there, and you can be taken down again within the hour. Every story on this site starts with the same two questions: how did this get on the list, and who wanted it there? OPEN THE ENTRY → ENTRY #001 momo “the shared alias” momo is not a person. It is the name millions of Chinese users wear at once — same handle, same stock cartoon avatar — so that anything they say arrives unsigned. Not a burner account. A costume everyone owns. OPEN THE ENTRY → ENTRY #002 眼前一黑 yǎn qián yì hēi “and everything went dark” The words describe fainting — the split second when your vision goes black. Online they describe reading something so stupid, so cringeworthy, or so exhausting that your body files a formal complaint. It is the closest Chinese has to “I physically cannot.” OPEN THE ENTRY → ENTRY #003 能工智人 néng gōng zhì rén “the working sapiens” Swap the first and last characters of 人工智能 — artificial intelligence — and you get 能工智人: a Homo sapiens that can work. Chinese office workers spent the summer of 2026 describing themselves as language models: finite tokens, a cheap afternoon tier, an overnight refresh. OPEN THE ENTRY → ENTRY #004 望周知 wàng zhōu zhī “please be advised” Three characters that close a real official notice, the way an English memo ends PLEASE BE ADVISED. Online they get stapled to things no institution would ever announce — your own depleted attention span, a discount at a scenic spot — and the joke is always the same: the voice of an authority, arriving on behalf of nobody. OPEN THE ENTRY → ENTRY #005 普信男 pǔ xìn nán “so ordinary, so confident” A compression of 普通却自信 — ordinary, yet confident. It does not mean stupid, or ugly, or even rude. It names one specific gap: the distance between what a man has actually done and the terms on which he believes he is owed your attention. OPEN THE ENTRY → ENTRY #006 负鼠 fù shǔ “the opossum”, and the philosophy that comes with it An opossum photographed standing at a window with its paws folded behind its back. Chinese users caption it, and every caption works the same way: take a phrase everyone already knows, break one character of it, and let the meaning drain out. What comes through is not protest. It is a small, rueful admission about yourself, made before anyone else can make it. OPEN THE ENTRY → ENTRY #007 钟馗 zhōng kuí China's demon-quelling guardian — a role assembled across ritual, legend, religion, theatre and art Not one stable biography and not merely a Chinese demon hunter. Across legend, ritual, religion, theatre and art, Zhong Kui has accumulated the force of a cultural office: demon-queller, household guardian, wronged scholar, Daoist divinity and painted door presence. That is why a game audience can ask who he really is — then answer that whoever takes up the sword against evil becomes Zhong Kui. OPEN THE ENTRY → ENTRY #008 牛马 niú mǎ human beasts of burden — workers calling themselves oxen and horses Chinese workers call themselves 牛马 — oxen and horses — when ‘employee’ sounds too flattering. The joke demotes a person from professional to load-bearing animal, then adds the modern indignity: real livestock stops when tired. The human animal makes coffee, pays for the internship and clocks back in. It is labour criticism delivered as a species correction. OPEN THE ENTRY → ENTRY #009 牛来 niú lái Niu Lai — a homemade film title that became a quality test, a chain of puns and, briefly, a living creature 牛来 is the title of a visibly homemade Chinese animated film. Online, it quickly stopped behaving like only a title. Commenters used it to test the supposedly ‘good’ films it threatened, broke its characters open to summon a bull market and then the Buddha by rhyme, and spoke of the film as a creature whose entire life had been justified by finding one person who understood it. The craft stayed rough. The name acquired polish. OPEN THE ENTRY → ENTRY #010 背锅 bēi guō to take the fall — especially for blame that belongs elsewhere 背锅 turns blame into cookware and responsibility into a load somebody must physically carry. It means to take the fall, usually before the real cause has been fixed and often for a mistake that belongs to somebody else. English can preserve the unfairness or the object. The Chinese word keeps both within reach — which is why the internet keeps drawing the wok. OPEN THE ENTRY → ENTRY #011 抽象 chōu xiàng so far outside ordinary logic that the wrongness becomes the aesthetic Standard Chinese gives 抽象 the sober job of meaning ‘abstract.’ The internet gives it work after reality has stopped making sense: a style, object or situation can become 抽象 when its logic is broken, its appearance is bizarre and the failure itself is funny. It may be criticism, affection or both. The translator must choose among surreal, unhinged, absurd and wild; the Chinese word keeps all four within reach. OPEN THE ENTRY → ENTRY #012 来都来了 lái dōu lái le well, we're already here Four characters, the same verb twice, and no reasoning in between: we are here, so we are doing it. 来都来了 is what Chinese speakers say at the ticket booth, the trailhead, the buffet and, this August, the camera roll. The cost is already paid; the sentence converts it into a principle. English has ‘might as well,’ which forgets the cost, and ‘sunk cost fallacy,’ which is far too honest. OPEN THE ENTRY →