天荒地老
tiān huāng dì lǎo
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
For as long as heaven and earth last; for ever and ever. Used mostly in vows and songs about undying love, usually after a word meaning 'until'.
Đến khi trời hoang tàn, đất già cỗi: mãi mãi, lâu như trời đất. Thường gặp trong lời thề và các bài hát về tình yêu vĩnh cửu, hay đi sau chữ “đến”.
Register: literary
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 ↗ · Vietnamese cognate: Idiomer entry “thiên hoang địa lão” (thien-hoang-dia-lao). Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Equivalents & related
Common questions
What does “天荒地老” mean?
For as long as heaven and earth last; for ever and ever. Used mostly in vows and songs about undying love, usually after a word meaning 'until'. Literally: the sky lies waste, the earth has aged
Is “天荒地老” formal or informal?
天荒地老 is generally literary.