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.
nèi xiàn
The needle's sinking inward past the depth proper to the site — the single cause chapter 52 gives for most of the mishaps it catalogues. It appears seven times, and each time the sentence says what the sinking reaches: the vessel at the guest-host point (inner leakage, deafness), the qi at the supraclavicular fossa (qi leaks out, panting and coughing) and at the cubital fossa (qi gathers, and the arm will not bend), the bladder three cun below the inner thigh (involuntary urination), the lung between the ribs (cough), and simply the flesh of the calf (swelling). It is the same fault chapter 51 calls 反, reversal: not a different needling, but this needling carried one level too far.
pí máo
The body's outer surface — skin and its hair — treated as the lung's external counterpart. It is the first thing an evil from outside meets, and the pairing between it and the lung is the road the evil takes inward.
fū zhàng
The second of the chapter's two primary distensions. When the defensive qi does not run counter inside the vessels but instead runs beside them, through the spaces of the flesh, the swelling appears in the skin rather than in the channel. The chapter names it in the same breath as vessel distension and gives it no separate treatment: Sanli, drained quickly, near cases once and far cases three times, without asking whether the case is vacuous or replete. The distinction is therefore diagnostic rather than therapeutic — what changes is where the qi is, not what the needle does.
pí bì
The obstruction that comes of meeting the three qi in autumn. Autumn is the season of the skin and the lung is the store the skin is matched with, so skin obstruction that persists and meets evil again lodges in the lung. Left in the skin it is the mildest of the five and the chapter counts it readily cured.
pí bù
The twelve regions into which the surface of the body is divided, each one belonging to a channel and taking its name from a part of a door: 害蜚 for the yang brilliance, 樞持 for the lesser yang, 關樞 for the greater yang, 樞儒 for the lesser yin, 害肩 for the heart master, 關蟄 for the greater yin. Hand and foot share one rule — 上下同法 — so the twelve are spoken of as six. The regions are not an anatomy but an address: read what lies within them and you read the channel they belong to, and the order in which an evil travels inward is an order through them, from skin to network vessel to conduit to depot. Chapter 56 is the only place in the Suwen where the doctrine is set out as a whole.
zòng fù chuí yú
The silhouette of the fat-bodied man, given twice and both times as a definition. The chapter has sorted bodies into three: 肥, whose shins are firm and skin full; 膏, whose shins are not firm and skin slack; and 肉, whose skin and flesh do not part. The 膏 man is the one whose qi is abundant and whose skin is loose, so that the belly slackens and the fat hangs; the 肉 man is simply large above and below; the 脂 man is drawn small even though fat. The phrase therefore does more than describe a shape — it identifies a constitution, with its own ratio of blood to qi and its own tolerance of cold. The slackness is the sign: where skin lets go, qi is abundant and the form spreads.
bù shí wò
Sleep that no longer keeps its hour. Chapter 29 lists it as one of the three signs that an evil taken by the yang side has entered the six palaces: the body is hot, sleep no longer comes at the proper time, and above there is panting and calling out. The phrase belongs to the same logic as the chapter's other seasonal tests — a body still in touch with the order of the day sleeps when it should, and one that has lost that order does not. Commentators from Wang Bing onward tend to take it simply as inability to sleep; the base text is more precise than that.
huá sè
The two poles by which chapter 28 judges every case it is asked about. Slippery means the qi is still travelling — there is something moving, and where something moves there is life; rough means the blood and qi have lost their fluency and the pulse is dragging. The chapter applies the test again and again, in almost identical words: slippery follows and rough is counterflow; slippery lives and rough dies; slippery-and-large is called life and hanging-and-rough is called death. Nothing else in the chapter is used as consistently.
sè
In chapter 39 this graph is not weeping. Read sè, it is a writing of 澀: sluggish, not flowing freely — the state of blood and vessels once cold has slowed them.
tì qiàn
Sneezing and yawning — 嚏 tì, a sneeze; 欠 qiàn, a yawn — and this chapter gives them as one sign, the sign that the needle has struck the kidney: 中腎，六日死，其動爲嚏欠. The chapter sets out five such signs, one for each depot, each with its own interval: 中心一日死而動為噫, 中肝五日死而動為語, 中肺三日死而動為欬, 中腎六日死而動為嚏欠, 中脾十日死而動為吞. Four of the five are a single graph; the kidney's is two. The parallel passage in chapter 52 writes 嚏 alone, and 張介賓 notes the difference in three words — 重出，增一欠字. The site keeps what this base text writes and records the variant instead of choosing between them. The word 動 is the chapter's own: 其動則依其藏之所變 — the movement shown follows whichever depot was struck.
tì qì
Snivel and tears, and the chapter's demonstration that they are one thing. 泣涕者，腦也；腦者，陰也。髓者，骨之充也。故腦滲爲涕 — tears and snivel are the brain, the brain is yin, the marrow fills the bone, and what seeps from the brain becomes snivel. Then the comparison: 夫涕之與泣者，譬如人之兄弟，急則俱死，生則俱生 — like brothers, dying together in extremity and living together in life. They come out together and run across, 涕泣俱出而横行, and the reason is 所屬之類也: they are of one kind. 泣 is read qì throughout; the site's entry for 泣 read sè is the other word entirely.
qiú nǜ
Spring's nose: a nose stopped by cold and a nose that bleeds, named together. Suwen 4 puts them at the head of its list of what each season is prone to, and then puts them at the head of its list of what a kept winter spares you — 故冬不按蹻，春不鼽衄，春不病頸項. The chapter's reason is written a few paragraphs earlier: 故春氣者，病在頭. Spring's disease is in the head, and the nose and the nape are both of the head. What the pair is not is two separate complaints; the chapter never separates them, and neither should the reader.