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.
yuān
A word that survives in the Suwen in two places and was already rare when the dictionaries were assembled. In chapter 7 it is the ache in the calf that comes with the three yang's disease: cold and heat, abscesses below, flaccidity, reversal, and an aching shank. In chapter 21 it is the heart that aches, when true emptiness is there and the one yin governs. Nothing else hangs on the word; it belongs to descriptions where the body hurts sourly and without inflammation, which is why the dictionaries reach for sour.
jiā lín
How the year's qi comes to rest on the year's circuit. 下加 is the 在泉 qi adding from below, as in 甲辰、甲戌，太宫下加太陰 or 癸巳、癸亥，少徴下加少陽; 上臨 is the 司天 qi approaching from above, as in 戊子、戊午，太徴上臨少陰. The chapter lists six of each and then asks what they mean: a year in which the added qi agrees with the circuit is a 天符 if the circuit is in excess, a 歲會 if it is short, and the degree of agreement — 變行有多少，病形有微甚，生死有早晏 — decides how hard the year falls. The two words are therefore the mechanism behind the table's verdicts, not a separate doctrine.
nì shùn
Adverse and favourable — the two directions a case can go, and the thing the chapter says a physician may finally speak of, but only after the year has been established, its qi known, and the corresponding qi of left and right seen. The condition is the point: 先立其年，以知其氣。左右應見，然後乃可以言死生之逆順. Nothing in the chapter allows a verdict to be given before that, and the chapter has already ruled out the one shortcut that might have served — the pulse cannot read the changes of heaven and earth.
nì jué
五藏之氣已絶於外，而用鍼者反實其内，是謂逆厥 — when the qi of the five viscera is cut off at the outside and the needler instead repletes the inside, this is called adverse inversion. 逆厥則必死，其死也躁 — death, and the death is agitated, because what was shut in turns and struggles. It is the exact mirror of 重竭: there the inside was gone and the outside was filled; here the outside is gone and the inside is filled. The correction: 反取四末刺之 — needle the four extremities instead. It is not 厥逆 (id 925), the general term for qi reversing upward.
mù
The gathering point — the point on the front of the trunk where a depot's or palace's qi collects, paired with the transport point on the back. Chapter 28 names it once, in the course of an emergency: sudden fullness of the abdomen that does not give under the hand is to be taken at the channel and network vessel of the hand greater yang, which is the stomach's alarm point. The chapter does not explain the term; it assumes the reader knows that a point exists where the stomach can be reached from the front.
tiān nián
The span allotted at birth: a hundred, in this chapter. It functions as a measure rather than a promise — the chapter's question is why people fall short of it, and the answer it gives is conduct.
gēng xū gēng mǎn
The alternation by which a healthy person digests. The chapter has just added up the gut's capacity — nine dou two sheng and a ge — and now says the balanced person is not a store: when the stomach is full the intestine is empty, when the intestine is full the stomach is empty, and the two take turns. That is why qi can pass up and down, why the five depots stay settled, why blood and vessels run harmoniously, and why the spirit has somewhere to lodge. The phrase is also the answer to the chapter's opening question: seven days without food kills because the reserve that the alternation keeps in play is at last spent.
zhèng huà rì
The verdict a year gets when the qi that governs it does its own work without being opposed: 甲辰歲。上太陽水，中太宫土運，下太陰土，寒化六，濕化五，正化日也. The word is used eleven times, always at the end of a run of numbers that count what each of the three qi turned into, and always in opposition to 邪氣化日, which is said of the years where 勝復同 — where one qi prevails and the other takes its revenge, so that the transformation is not the year's own. The table's arithmetic is the chapter's answer to the opening question about 六化: this is 化 seen in the calendar, one year at a time.
zhèng huà dù
The verdict reached by counting. Nineteen of the sixty years end 正化度也, nine end 邪氣化度也: 庚辰、庚戌歲。上太陽水，中太商金運，下太陰土。寒化一，清化九，雨化五，正化度也. The difference between 日 and 度 is not in the meaning — both say whether the year's transformation is the upright one — but in how it is arrived at. The 日-rows judge the year by its 化; the 度-rows judge it by the numbers those 化 produce, which is why the word appears where the table is at its most arithmetical. The closing line of the table gathers both: 凡此定期之紀，勝復正化，皆有常數.
zōng qì
Chapter 18 gives the ancestral qi a place. It is at 虚里, the great network vessel of the stomach, which comes out below the left breast and beats strongly enough to stir the clothing; the chapter says plainly that this is 脉宗氣也, the qi the pulse descends from. Two things are read from it. Its quality tells where the disease is: full, panting, rapid and interrupted means the disease is in the centre; knotted and transverse means an accumulation; a beat that does not come at all is death. And when the beat is so large it moves the clothes, the ancestral qi itself is leaking out.
zōng jīn
The great sinew at the gathering of the yin and yang vessels, bound to the bones and working the joints. The chapter makes it the hinge of its last argument: the thoroughfare vessel joins yang brightness there, all the vessels meet at the qi street, and when yang brightness fails the ancestral sinews go slack and the legs stop working.
fǎn zhé
The second of the three signs at the end of the greater yang, and the one that names a posture: the body folded backward on itself, head and heels drawn together. The chapter gives it two characters, and the tradition reads it as the spine. It is the chapter's most purely physical sign — nothing in it needs interpreting, you can see it from across the room.