It's a long story.
CHINESE DICTIONARY ENTRY
说来话长
start explaining and it's a long story (idiom); complicated and not easy to express succinctly
IN A VIDEO说来话长
See this word with its surrounding sentence, pinyin, translation, and timestamp.
DEFINITIONS & USAGE
Meaning and common use
01
start explaining and it's a long story (idiom); complicated and not easy to express succinctly
REAL CORPUS EXAMPLES
How 说来话长 actually appears in real sentences.
These sentences are copied from the Tatoeba corpus, so they are real usage rather than generated text. 说来话长 appears in 2 of the 89,190 sentences we searched.
"How did you two meet?" "It's a long story."
ABOUT THIS ENTRY
Where this entry comes from
The HSK level, part of speech, and pronunciation come from the HSK 3.1 vocabulary syllabus. The English definitions come from CC-CEDICT. Corpus sentences, collocations, and the frequency figure come from the Tatoeba Chinese sentence export and are counted rather than written, so nothing on this page is invented. Usage notes and the hand-written examples that appear higher up exist only for a handful of entries.
Definitions from CC-CEDICT, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Vocabulary levels and parts of speech from the HSK 3.1 syllabus. This compiled dictionary is shared under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
COMMON QUESTIONS
About 说来话长
What does 说来话长 mean in Chinese?
说来话长 (shuōláihuàcháng) means start explaining and it's a long story (idiom); complicated and not easy to express succinctly.
How do you pronounce 说来话长?
说来话长 is pronounced shuōláihuàcháng.
Is 说来话长 an HSK word?
说来话长 is on the list of the HSK 3.1 vocabulary syllabus.
SEE IT IN CONTEXT
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