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.
dà xiě
To drain all the yin vessels at once, and the name of a fatal mistake. 取五脉者死，言病在中，氣不足，但用鍼盡大寫其諸陰之脉也 — taking the five vessels means death: the disease is within and the qi is insufficient, yet the needle is used to drain every yin vessel utterly. The word 大 here is adverbial, as it so often is in this edition: not a large drainage but a complete one. Zhang Jiebin glosses it exactly so, 大寫，謂盡瀉之, and the chapter's own line has 盡 immediately before it. The passage is the counterweight to the supplementing rule of Chapter One: the same needle, the same point, and the difference between life and death is whether the direction was read correctly.
dà lóu
A severe curvature of the spine. The chapter traces it to yang failing to open and close the pores, so that cold settles into the sinews and along the transport points.
dà luò
The great network vessels — 大 dà, great; 絡 luò, a net — and this chapter names them twice, in the two sentences its whole argument depends on. The first says where an evil goes when it cannot get in: 不得入於經，流溢於大絡，而生奇病也 — the fine network is blocked, the channel will not take it, and it overflows into the great network vessel. The second says what that vessel does: 夫邪客大絡者，左注右，右注左，上下左右，與經相干，而布於四末 — it pours left into right and right into left. That crossing is why the chapter has a method; an evil that stayed where it entered could not be treated from the far side, and the chapter says as much in the line that names its method: 其氣無常處，不入於經俞，命曰繆刺. The word is not the channel and not the fine network; it is the largest of the connecting vessels, the one big enough to cross the body's midline. It has not appeared in any chapter transcribed on this site before.
jù cì
The great puncture — 巨 jù, great; 刺 cì, to puncture — and the chapter introduces it by setting it beside the crossing puncture: 身形有痛，九𠉀莫病，則繆刺之；痛在於左而右脉病者，巨刺之. The two cases are distinguished by what the pulse is doing. Pain with the nine probes quiet means the disorder has not reached the channels, and 繆刺 takes the network vessels. Pain on one side with the vessel diseased on the other means the channels are involved, and 巨刺 takes them. 王冰 puts it in one line: the crossing puncture takes the network vessels, the great puncture takes the channels — both go to the opposite side, and what separates them is depth. This is the distinction the tradition has kept, and it is why the chapter gives the two methods in one sentence rather than one. The site has had 繆刺 since chapter 27 without its partner; the word occurs once here and has not appeared on the site before.
dà qì
In chapter 27, the great evil qi — the thing draining is supposed to get out and supplementing is supposed to keep in. The word appears three times and the three uses are what define it: 大氣皆出, it all comes out, closes the description of draining; 大氣留止, it stays and rests, closes the description of supplementing; and 大氣已過, it has already passed, is what the physician finds when he has watched carelessly and drains too late, so that the true qi falls away instead. Commentators who take it as the qi of the chest run into trouble with the second of the three: supplementing is not meant to make the chest qi stay.
tài chōng mài
The Chong vessel — the 'surge' — tied in this chapter to the flourishing and decline of the menses. It rises and falls on the same seven-year schedule as the heavenly water, which is precisely why the two are named together.
dà hàn
The decisive sweat that marks recovery. Chapter 32 assigns each depot heat disease a day on which it worsens and a day on which the great sweat comes; the worsening day belongs to the phase that conquers the depot, the sweating day to the depot's own phase. The chapter states the rule twice more in general terms, which makes the great sweat the chapter's principal sign that the disease has turned. It is not the same thing as sweating as a symptom, and not the same as the final sweat of a dying patient.
dà fēng
The last and longest case in chapter 55, and the only one the chapter gives a calendar to: heavy joints, beard and eyebrows fallen out, and a treatment that runs in two halves of a hundred days each — needle the flesh until it sweats for a hundred days, then needle to the bone and marrow for another hundred — and stops when the beard and eyebrows grow again. Everything else in the chapter ends on 病已止, the illness done; this one ends on a sign that can only be seen after two hundred days.
kē jí
The chapter's word for the serious illness that does not arise — the one you avoid by following the seasons rather than by any treatment. The transmitted text varies between 苛 and 奇 here; both readings are recorded.
gǔ
The second name the chapter gives to the disease at the kidney stage. Wind-cold that was never treated passes from the spleen to the kidney, where it is called 疝瘕 — with smouldering heat and pain in the lower abdomen and a white discharge — and it is also called 蠱. The alternative name matters: 疝瘕 describes what can be felt, while 蠱 names what is presumed to be causing it. At this stage only pressing and medicine remain; the three options of the spleen stage have been reduced to two.
guān gé
The state in which both pulses — neck and wrist — are four or more times too full. The chapter is blunt about it: 不能極於天地之精氣，則死矣, the pulse is overfull and cannot reach the essence-qi of heaven and earth, and there is death. One textual point: the base text has 贏; some take it as a slip for 盈, overfull, while 王冰 glosses it as 盛. Both readings point the same way.
guǎng míng
In the sixth chapter, the name for what lies before the sage as he stands facing south — the upper body, and the south that faces the light. It is the fixed point from which the channels are laid out: broad brightness is above the middle of the body, and greater yin lies below it.