Each entry gives the term in traditional and simplified form, its pinyin, the senses it carries in the classical corpus, the passages where it does real work, and how published translations have rendered it.
qì
Qi is what the texts call the activity of a thing rather than the thing itself — the breath, warmth and movement by which a system does its work. This site leaves it untranslated, because every English substitute (energy, force, vital power) implies a physics the texts never assume.
qì wèi
Chapter 22 says that food and drug alike should be taken with their qi and flavour in accord, and thereby supplement the essence and boost the qi. It is the sentence that keeps the chapter's dietetics from being a flavour table. A taste without its qi or a qi without its taste is half a remedy, and the rest of the chapter has already shown why: the same bitter that firms the kidney drains the spleen, so flavour alone never decides anything. What decides is what is taken, with what, and by whom.
qì jué
The name chapter 37 gives to its own subject: illness that moves from one viscus into another because qi has run contrary to its course. The chapter lists fifteen such transmissions and closes by naming the single cause behind all fifteen.
shuǐ gǔ qì
The qi extracted from food and drink — what the body lives on after the stomach has done its work and the spleen has carried the result outward. Chapter 29 makes it the hinge of its account of the limbs: the limbs take their qi from the stomach, but they cannot receive the qi of water and grain unless the spleen moves it, and when the spleen fails they weaken day by day until sinew, bone, muscle and flesh have nothing to live on. The phrase belongs to the chapter's earth side of things: water and grain are what the pharynx takes in, as opposed to the air that the throat takes in.
qì huà
The word on which the bladder's office turns, and the only place in this chapter where it appears. Fluid gathers and is held; it leaves because qi transforms it. Later usage widens 氣化 to cover every metabolic change in the body, and that wider sense is the one readers will meet elsewhere. Here it is narrower and more physical: the step by which what is stored becomes what can be discharged.
qì pò
The counterpart of 氣淫. The season has come and the qi has not: what the missing qi would have overcome runs wild (所勝妄行), what it would have generated falls ill (所生受病), and the quarter it cannot overcome presses in on it (所不勝薄之). Where 淫 is overstepping, 迫 is being pressed — and the same word 薄 appears in both, as the pressure that results either way.
qì yín
The name this chapter gives to excess. Qi that arrives before its season does two things at once: 薄所不勝, it presses on the quarter it cannot overcome, and 乘所勝, it rides over the quarter it can. The choice of 淫 is the point — the fault is not force but order, a qi that has overstepped its bound, and the word says so.
qū
The flank — below the arm, above the ribs. Chapter 48 swells it in both the lung's and the liver's 雍, which is why the two entries read so nearly alike; what separates them is the company, panting in the lung and fright on lying down in the liver.
zhǔ qì
The qi that holds its place. At the end of the chapter, after the four prohibitions and the licence to offend against them when the weather has turned, comes the last question: 假者何如？ and the answer 有假其氣，則無禁也，所謂主氣不足，客氣勝也. The six 主氣 are the fixed seasonal qi — 厥陰風木、少陰君火、少陽相火、太陰濕土、陽明燥金、太陽寒水 — each in charge of two months; the 客氣 is the qi the year brings. When the visiting qi is stronger than the one in charge, the prohibitions of 四畏 can be set aside. The pair 主/客 is the chapter's final distinction, and it is the one that makes the whole sixty-year apparatus usable at the bedside.
wàng qì
The qi that is in its season and at its full. The chapter explains with it the one failure of treatment that is not the formula's fault: 帝曰：服寒而反熱，服熱而反寒，其故何也？歧伯曰：治其王氣，是以反也. To treat the season's own qi is to treat what is strongest and should be left; the medicine reaches the qi that is at its height and drives it, and the patient's cold turns to heat or his heat to cold. Pressed further — 帝曰：不治王而然者，何也？ — the chapter gives the second cause, 不治五味屬也, and the passage on the five flavours entering the stomach follows. The word therefore carries both halves of the argument: what happens when the season's qi is treated, and what happens when the flavours go to their own viscera and the qi grows with use — 久而增氣，物化之常也；氣增而久，夭之由也.
qì kǒu
The place on the wrist at which the whole body can be read, and the chapter's answer to why. It is not that the wrist is connected to everything; it is that everything the organs live on passes through the stomach first, and the qi mouth is the greater yin — the lung vessel, to which all the vessels present themselves. So the qi and flavour of the organs and palaces come out of the stomach and show their changes here.