xiè yì
Also rendered: xieyi (Pinyin, for a word with no settled English) · loosening and lassitude (Descriptive) · lassitude (The commonest single word) · slackness of the limbs (Older descriptive rendering)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
A state rather than a disease, given once in chapter 18 and never spoken of again: 尺脉緩濇,謂之解㑊 — a cubit pulse that is moderate and rough, and the body slack with it, the limbs unable to hold themselves up, sleep heavy and strength gone. The word is read xiè yì (some read jiě yì); the base text writes 㑊 , a character the 說文 does not contain, and later copies vary between 㑊, 亦 and 怠.
Passages where the term does real work, with the original, pinyin and English on the same line.
Every rendering below is a decision about which reader is being addressed. There is no neutral option.
| Common English | lassitude, or exhaustion | Most accounts of the passage simply describe the state; the word itself is usually left in pinyin. |
| This site | xieyi, glossed as loosening and lassitude | The word is a hapax in this chapter and its second graph is not in 說文, so there is no English for it that is not a description. It is given in pinyin with a gloss, so that the reader recognises it when it recurs in the Lingshu; the gloss takes its cue from 解, which in 說文 is 判, to split — a person taken apart, not merely tired. Lassitude alone would put this among the complaints of tiredness and lose the fact that the chapter pairs it with a pulse. |
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