天经地义
tiān jīng dì yì
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Traditional: 天經地義
Perfectly right and natural; a principle nobody would question. Used to say that something is simply how things should be, such as repaying a debt or caring for your parents.
Lẽ phải hiển nhiên của trời đất: điều hoàn toàn đúng đắn, đương nhiên, không ai bàn cãi. Dùng để khẳng định một việc vốn dĩ phải như thế, như vay thì phải trả, con cái phải chăm sóc cha mẹ.
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 ↗ · Vietnamese cognate: Idiomer entry “thiên kinh địa nghĩa” (thien-kinh-dia-nghia). Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Equivalents & related
Common questions
What does “天经地义” mean?
Perfectly right and natural; a principle nobody would question. Used to say that something is simply how things should be, such as repaying a debt or caring for your parents. Literally: heaven's norm, earth's principle
Is “天经地义” formal or informal?
天经地义 is generally neutral.