十面埋伏
shí miàn mái fú
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Troops lying in ambush on every side, so that the enemy has no way out. Used for being completely surrounded, in war or figuratively; also the title of a famous pipa piece and of a 2004 film.
Bố trí quân mai phục khắp mười phía khiến đối phương không còn lối thoát. Dùng để chỉ thế bị bao vây tứ bề, theo nghĩa đen hoặc nghĩa bóng; cũng là tên một bản nhạc tì bà nổi tiếng và một bộ phim năm 2004.
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 面 = diện · Vietnamese cognate: Idiomer entry “thập diện mai phục” (thap-dien-mai-phuc). Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Equivalents & related
Common questions
What does “十面埋伏” mean?
Troops lying in ambush on every side, so that the enemy has no way out. Used for being completely surrounded, in war or figuratively; also the title of a famous pipa piece and of a 2004 film. Literally: ambush on ten sides
Is “十面埋伏” formal or informal?
十面埋伏 is generally neutral.