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.
wǔ yùn liù qì
The two reckonings together. The five circuits run on the ten heavenly stems: 甲己土、乙庚金、丙辛水、丁壬木、戊癸火, with 太少 marking excess and deficit; the six qi run on the twelve earthly branches, two years to each. The chapter's opening question puts them side by side: 五運、六氣之應見，六化之正，六變之紀，何如？ and the sixty-year table answers by giving both for every year — 甲子、甲午歲。上少陰火，中太宫土運，下陽明金. When the two agree the table says 天符 or 歲會 or 同正; when they do not, it counts the difference. The phrase in the passage on 盛衰 is the chapter's own summary of what it has been doing for sixty years.
wǔ shèng
The overcoming sequence among the five phases, named in chapter 25 as one of the things a physician must be able to hold, and illustrated in the chapter's most quotable five clauses. The term itself appears in the phrase 五勝更立 — the conquests set each other up in turn — and the illustration follows shortly after: wood is felled by metal, fire quenched by water, earth opened by wood, metal flawed by fire, water cut off by earth. This site keeps sheng as 'conquest' rather than 'overcoming' because the chapter is describing what happens when two phases meet, not a hierarchy.
wǔ cháng
The five standing measures — whatever five things the chapter takes as given and established before it begins. The text is unusual in naming them and then never saying what they are: 考建五常 is the fourth of four opening clauses and the chapter moves straight past it to the question. What the word does is set the register: the business in hand is the ordering of the year by fixed measures, not the treatment of a patient, and that is why the answer, when it comes, is about images rather than numbers.
wǔ yù
The five kinds of pent-up qi, and the five ways out. 木鬱逹之，火鬱發之，土鬱奪之，金鬱泄之，水鬱折之，然調其氣，過者折之，以其畏也，所謂冩之 — each element gets a different verb, which is the point: wood is to be opened up, fire let out, earth taken away, metal drained, water bent aside. The treatment follows what the element does when it is stuck. Each of the five also has its own paragraph earlier in the chapter, saying when it breaks out and what it does to the weather and to men, so that the last page of the chapter is a coda to a passage hundreds of graphs long.
wǔ xīng
The five wandering stars as a single set: Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Venus and Mercury, one to each of the five circuits. The chapter uses them one at a time throughout its ten tables and names them together once, in the question that opens its last movement — whether the planets answer to a sudden change as well as to the settled course of the year. The answer is no, and the reason is that they move by what they receive from heaven: 應常不應卒, they answer to the constant and not to the sudden. What follows is the chapter's account of how a star is read — by its halting, its size, its colour, and the direction it takes.
wǔ qì
The five qi — the five as they govern the year, and in the chapter's closing line the five as they take their turn. The rule the chapter ends on is the plainest thing in it: 五氣更立，各有所先，非其位則邪，當其位則正. Out of its place a qi is evil; in its proper place it is correct. The same rule has already been given for the pulse (不當其位者病，迭移其位者病，失守其位者危) and for the five directions, where each qi is told what it generates, what it harms and what overcomes that harm.
wǔ fāng
The frame of the chapter. Each region gets land and water first, then dwelling and diet, then the illness that follows, then the one therapy that answers it: the stone needle in the east, potent drugs in the west, cautery in the north, the nine needles in the south, guiding and pressing in the centre. Wang Bing aligns four of them with the seasons — east with spring, west with autumn, north with winter, south with summer — and the centre with the virtue of earth. What is distinctive here is not the fivefold scheme, common enough in this literature, but that each region contributes one method and nothing else.
wǔ yīn
The five notes — 宫商角徵羽 — and the fifth term in the series by which chapter 54 sets the nine needles against the numbers of the world: one to heaven, two to earth, three to man, four to the seasons, five to the tones, six to the pitch-pipes, seven to the stars, eight to the winds, nine to the wilds. The chapter does more than list them. 人聲應音 puts a person's voice against the tones, 五聲應五音六律 sets the five voices against the tones and the pipes together, and 以候宫商角徴羽 makes the five of them something to be watched for in a patient. The number is the point: five of nine, in a count that runs from the sky down to the body and back.
wǔ huà
The five transformations of a year — 生、長、化、收、藏 — which this chapter uses to say what condition the year is in. Each of the five even circuits is given it with a different predicate: 敷和之紀…五化宣平, 升明之紀…五化均衡, 備化之紀…五化齊脩, 審平之紀…五化宣明, 靜順之紀…五化咸整. The five predicates are the whole judgement of the year in one word each: the five transformations spread and level, or even in measure, or ordered together, or bright and open, or all of them complete. Below the even circuits the term is not used again — when a circuit falls short or goes to excess, the chapter names the single transformation that fails (化氣乃揚、化氣乃昌、長氣不宣), because a broken year is described by which step broke rather than by the five together.
wǔ fēng
The winds of the five viscera, by contrast with the eight winds of the directions. Suwen 4 opens with the contrast: heaven has eight winds, the channels have five winds. The eight belong to the quarters of the sky and come from outside; the five belong to the viscera and are what those eight become once they have entered — 八風發邪，以爲經風，觸五藏。The chapter never names the five one by one, and it does not need to: it had already given each viscus its quarter, its colour, its orifice and its number, and the five winds are those five, moved.
sì sài
The four blockages. The chapter quotes 《脈要》 for the words and then uses them: 《脈要》曰：春不沈，夏不弦，冬不濇，秋不數，是謂四塞 — in spring the pulse is not to be 沈, in summer not 弦, in winter not 濇, in autumn not 數; to lose the season's own quality and take another's is for the year to run shut. 王冰 glosses it 天地四時之氣，閉塞而無所運行也, and 馬蒔 reads the sentence as the season cutting itself off from the qi that bore it — 四塞而不交通. What follows is the grading of the same four faults when they are excessive — 沈甚曰病，弦甚曰病，濇甚曰病，數甚曰病 — and then the faults of number and time, 參見曰病，復見曰病，未去而去曰病，去而不去曰病，反者死. The passage closes by naming the principle the four measure: 氣之相守司也，如權衡之不得相失也.
sì qì
The chapter's title term: the four seasonal qi, and the regimen that answers to each. 'Regulating the spirit with the four qi' (四氣調神) means ordering one's inner life by the season rather than by appetite.