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.
shī jué
Corpse inversion — 尸 shī, a corpse; 厥 jué, inversion — and the chapter uses it once, at the close of its hardest case: 五絡俱竭，令人身脉皆動，而形無知也，其狀若尸，或曰尸厥. The body's vessels are all moving and the form knows nothing; he looks like a corpse, and 或曰 — some call it — corpse inversion. The hedging word is the point. This is the state that looks like death and is not, and the chapter is careful not to collapse the two. Its prescription is the longest in the chapter: five punctures in order, then — if they fail — a bamboo tube blown into the ears, an inch of hair from the left temple burned, and a cup of wine given, or poured in for a man who cannot swallow. 《史記·扁鵲倉公列傳》 has 扁鵲 bringing the crown prince of 虢 round from the same state and writes the word 尸蹶, with 蹶 where this base text writes 厥. The word has not appeared in any chapter transcribed on this site before.
kài
The single symptom chapter 38 is written about. It is defined not by its sound but by its causes: an evil that enters through the skin and body hair, cold food and drink that rise from the stomach to the lung, and an evil from outside meeting an evil from within. Once that meeting has happened, each store and each palace coughs in its own way.
jué nì
Qi that has turned and is travelling against its proper direction. In chapter 30 it is the state of Yangming when it rebels upward: the patient pants, the panting distresses him, and the distress makes him unable to bear company. The same counterflow carries the chapter's only prognostic judgement — reached to the depots it kills, reached only to the channels it does not.
jué qì
In chapter 21 this is not a named disease but the behaviour behind several of them. The lesser yang arrives alone and it is counterflow qi. Greater yang arriving alone breathes counterflow: panting, with empty qi rising. At the end of the chapter the reverting yin governs, true emptiness aches in the heart, and the counterflow qi lodges and presses against something until white sweat breaks out. Chapter three named two disorders on the same word, scorching inversion from a summer heat and sudden inversion from a rage that carries blood upward; here we are one step upstream of those namings, watching the motion itself.
nì qì
Qi moving against its own course. What makes the idea clinical rather than abstract is that the chapter always says which qi and which course: the stomach's qi should go down and instead goes up, and the person cannot lie down; the lung's connecting vessels should follow the channels up and down and instead lodge, and the person's breathing is audible while the rest of life goes on as usual.
shī
Dampness as a disease evil, and in chapter 29 the specific counterpart of wind. The chapter assigns the two by behaviour: yang receives wind qi and yin receives damp qi, and because wind is light and rises while damp is heavy and sinks, the one harmed by wind is affected above first and the one harmed by damp is affected below first. That single observation — two lines of the chapter — became the basis of everything later medicine says about where damp settles and how it is recognised. The chapter's damp arrives on the yin side, which is to say from the inside and from below.
rú xiè
Dampness soaking into the body and then draining out of it — the fifth of the chapter's five conquests, and the only one that names a discharge. Suwen 5 gives the run in a single sentence: wind overcomes and the body moves, heat overcomes and it swells, dryness overcomes and it dries, cold overcomes and it floats, dampness overcomes and it soaks and drains. The word holds both halves of what dampness does — it soaks first and drains afterwards — and this site's base text keeps the old graph 寫 where modern texts print 瀉. The chapter's other statement of the same relationship comes in the five phases: 濕傷肉，風勝濕.
dān nüè
Malaria with heat and no cold. The yin qi has been cut off first, so the yang qi breaks out alone: scant qi with fretting distress, heat in the hands and feet, a wish to vomit. The late passage locates it — inward in the heart, outward between the parted flesh — and names its end stage, wasting and scorching until the flesh is stripped off.
dàn dàn
A reduplicative describing a rocking, unsteady sensation, as of something adrift on water. Chapter 32 uses it once, in the kidney heat disease: when the qi counterflows the nape aches, spins, and will not be still. It is set beside 員員, which describes the turning, so that the two words together give the quality of the pain from two sides.
huán sǐ
The shortest of the chapter's death sentences and the worst: 中心者，環死. Strike the heart and the person dies within one circuit, which the commentary tradition takes as a single day, the qi going round once. It sits among intervals counted in days — five for the spleen and the lung, seven for the kidney, a year for the diaphragm. The chapter is doing arithmetic on dying, and 環 is its smallest unit.
bí yuān
A discharge from the nose that does not stop; produced when the gallbladder shifts heat into the brain. Still the standard Chinese medical name for chronic sinusitis.
xū xié zéi fēng
Pathogenic factors named for how they arrive: they strike where defence is thin (虛) and get in unnoticed (賊). The instruction that follows — avoidance in season (避之有時) — is the corpus's earliest statement of preventive regimen.