道听途说
dào tīng tú shuō
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Traditional: 道聽途說
Hearsay: something picked up in the street and passed on without checking. Used to dismiss information as unreliable rumour, or to warn people not to believe it too quickly.
Nghe ngoài đường rồi lại kể ngoài đường: tin nghe lỏm được rồi truyền đi mà không kiểm chứng. Dùng để nói một thông tin chỉ là lời đồn không đáng tin, hoặc để khuyên đừng vội tin.
Register: neutral
Examples
Editorial example (illustrative, not a corpus attestation) — awaiting a native-speaker check
Sources & notes
Hán-Việt bridge batch 062 (2026-11-13). Headword, Traditional form and pinyin checked against CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) source ↗ · Hán-Việt reading: Unihan kVietnamese source ↗ ; en.wiktionary Vietnamese entries via kaikki.org extract, snapshot 2026-07-31 (CC BY-SA 4.0): Hán-Việt reading 说/說 = thuyết · Vietnamese cognate: Idiomer entry “đạo thính đồ thuyết” (dao-thinh-do-thuyet). Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Equivalents & related
Common questions
What does “道听途说” mean?
Hearsay: something picked up in the street and passed on without checking. Used to dismiss information as unreliable rumour, or to warn people not to believe it too quickly. Literally: heard on the road, told on the way
Is “道听途说” formal or informal?
道听途说 is generally neutral.