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.
zhuó yīn
The heavy, turbid half of qi, the half that sinks. Suwen 5 uses it as the exact mirror of 清陽: as the clear makes heaven, the turbid makes earth; as the clear leaves by the upper orifices, the turbid leaves by the lower; as the clear opens the interstices and fills the four limbs, the turbid walks the viscera and goes home to the palaces. The word is not a synonym for evil here — in this chapter it is what remains after the clear part has been taken up, and its whole business is to descend. The chapter's pathology follows from the direction: 清氣在下，則生飱泄；濁氣在上，則生䐜脹 — the disorder is put as a reversal of the two directions.
hún hún
A pulse that has lost its shape — muddy, unreadable. The second of the three prohibitions. The chapter can read a malaria pulse when it has one to read: restless in yang, quiet in yin. Turbulent means there is nothing to read, and at that point there is nothing to treat.
liǎng yáng hé míng
The name of 陽明, given by the chapter as a piece of arithmetic on the two yang within it: 帝曰：陽明何謂也？歧伯曰：兩陽合明也. The answer turns the name into a description — the brightness of 陽明 is what comes of two yangs joining — and the chapter then uses the same words a second time for something larger. Asked 幽明何如？ it answers 兩陰交盡，故曰幽；兩陽合明，故曰明，幽明之配，寒暑之異也, so that 兩陽合明 becomes the name of the bright half of the year as 兩陰交盡 is the name of the dark. The pair is used as the ground of the 分至 that follow, and it is one of three places where the chapter explains a qi's name instead of merely using it.
liǎng yīn jiāo jìn
The name of 厥陰, read out of the two yin that meet and end in it: 帝曰：厥陰何也？歧伯曰：兩陰交盡也. The chapter then uses the words again, and in the second use they name something larger: 兩陰交盡，故曰幽 — the dark half of the year, set against 兩陽合明，故曰明, with 幽明之配，寒暑之異也 for the closing statement. Read with its opposite number it is a diagram of the six qi's ends: 厥陰 is where the yin comes to its last, 陽明 where the yang has gathered all its light, and the two together mark the farthest points of cold and heat, which is why the passage goes on at once to the 分至.
jiě huò
Untying confusion is the last of the five joints. The case is not weakness but wind throughout the body with the blood vessels empty on one side: 血脉偏虚，虚者不足，實者有餘 — one side deficient, the other in excess — so that the body cannot keep its level, 傾側宛伏, and the man does not know east from west or south from north, is now up and now down, now face up and now face down, 顛倒無常，甚於迷惑. The method is the plainest of the five and the hardest: 寫其有餘，補其不足，陰陽平復 — drain the excess, fill the deficiency, and let yin and yang come back level. Do that and the cure is quicker than the confusion: 疾於解惑. Its interest is that the chapter names no point and no needle, only a principle, as if to say that the fifth joint is the first one understood.
zhèng xié
The mild evil that enters when the body is exerting itself: sweat comes out, the interstices open, an empty wind is met, and the strike is so slight that neither the patient nor anyone else notices. Chapter 26 sets it beside 虚邪 and uses the contrast to say why the good physician is rare — the empty evil announces itself by season and direction, while this one gives no sign at all and can only be caught by someone who reads the three regions and nine indicators before anything has formed.
zhèng qì
A person's own proper qi. Chapter 39 names it once, at the very end: in thought the mind holds and the spirit returns to it, and the upright qi stays put instead of moving — the only one of the nine qi with no cause from outside.
zhèng zhì
Treatment that opposes the disease. The chapter gives the name twice and defines it the second time by its counterpart: 帝曰：何謂逆從？歧伯曰：逆者，正治，從者，反治，從少從多，觀其事也 — what runs against the disease is 正治, what runs with it is 反治, and how much of either is a matter of proportion. The first mention adds the condition under which each is used: 謹察陰陽所在而調之，以平爲期，正者正治，反者反治, where 王冰 explains 正者 as the case in which the disease is where it should be — 陰病陽不病，陽病陰不病 — and therefore is met head on. 正治 is thus the ordinary rule which the whole earlier passage of the discourse has been stating — 寒者熱之，熱者寒之，堅者削之，勞者温之 — and 反治 is the exception that the next paragraph expounds.
zhì yīn
Where yin reaches its extreme — in this chapter, the belly. It is the third term in a chain of likenesses: water is yin, the region below the eyes is yin, and the belly is where the utmost yin dwells, so water in the belly must show as swelling below the eyes. The chapter argues by category, and says that it is arguing by category.
xū shí
The pair chapter 53 takes as its subject: 虚實之要, the essential point of vacuity and repletion. Three pairings are given as the constant — qi and body, grain and qi, vessel and blood, each replete with replete and vacuous with vacuous — and to be the reverse of any of them is illness. Five reversals follow, each with its cause, and the chapter ends by saying what the two are at the needle: repletion is qi entering and is heat, vacuity is qi going out and is cold. The site leaves the pair as vacuity and repletion, the rendering chapter 28 already uses.
tài bái
The planet Venus, the star of metal and of the west, and the most frequently named of the five in this chapter. The name is the colour: white is the west's colour and metal's, and the great white is the brightest of the wandering stars. Metal in surplus answers to it (歲金太過…上應太白星), and wood falling short answers to it twice in the same answer, because what rises against short wood is dryness (歲木不及，燥乃大行…上應太白星). It closes the wood passage a third time, when the shrivelling is complete.
mài zhàng
Distension of the vessels themselves, and the first of the two forms from which the chapter derives all the rest. The distinction is made by where the defensive qi has gone: when the nutrient qi keeps to the vessels and the defensive runs counter to them, the vessels distend; when the defensive runs alongside the vessels in the spaces between, the skin distends. The pair is given before any organ distension is listed, the argument being that every named form is an instance of one of the two. Both are treated at Sanli and drained quickly, whether the case looks vacuous or replete.