胡思乱想
hú sī luàn xiǎng
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Traditional: 胡思亂想
To fill one's head with groundless worries, suspicions or daydreams; to overthink. Extremely common in everyday speech, especially when telling someone to stop doing it.
Nghĩ ngợi lung tung, toàn những điều vô căn cứ: lo lắng, nghi ngờ hay tưởng tượng vẩn vơ. Rất thông dụng trong lời nói hằng ngày, nhất là khi khuyên ai đó đừng nghĩ nhiều.
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 胡 = hồ; etymology of “hồ tư loạn tưởng” = 胡思亂想 · Vietnamese cognate: Idiomer entry “hồ tư loạn tưởng” (ho-tu-loan-tuong). Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Equivalents & related
Common questions
What does “胡思乱想” mean?
To fill one's head with groundless worries, suspicions or daydreams; to overthink. Extremely common in everyday speech, especially when telling someone to stop doing it. Literally: think recklessly, imagine wildly
Is “胡思乱想” formal or informal?
胡思乱想 is generally neutral.