狐假虎威
hú jiǎ hǔ wēi
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
📖 Read the story behind this idiom: The fox and the tiger
To bully or impress people by leaning on someone else's power, like the fox in the fable that scared the other animals by walking in front of a tiger. Always critical.
Cáo mượn oai hổ: dựa vào quyền thế của người khác để doạ nạt, lên mặt với mọi người. Luôn mang ý chê.
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 假 = giả · Vietnamese cognate: Idiomer entry “hồ giả hổ oai” (ho-gia-ho-oai). Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Equivalents & related
Common questions
What does “狐假虎威” mean?
To bully or impress people by leaning on someone else's power, like the fox in the fable that scared the other animals by walking in front of a tiger. Always critical. Literally: the fox borrows the tiger's might
Is “狐假虎威” formal or informal?
狐假虎威 is generally neutral.