天罗地网
tiān luó dì wǎng
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Traditional: 天羅地網
Nets spread above and below so that nothing can slip through: a tight ring that leaves no way out. Used mostly for police or military operations to catch someone.
Lưới giăng trên trời, lưới bủa dưới đất: vòng vây kín mít, không cách nào thoát. Thường dùng cho việc công an, quân đội bủa vây truy bắt tội phạm hay kẻ địch.
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): etymology of “thiên la địa võng” = 天羅地網 · Vietnamese cognate: Idiomer entry “thiên la địa võng” (thien-la-dia-vong). Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Equivalents & related
Common questions
What does “天罗地网” mean?
Nets spread above and below so that nothing can slip through: a tight ring that leaves no way out. Used mostly for police or military operations to catch someone. Literally: nets in the sky, nets on the ground
Is “天罗地网” formal or informal?
天罗地网 is generally neutral.