小黠大痴 — “Penny wise and pound foolish”

小黠大痴 is a Chinese idiom (chengyu) meaning “Penny wise and pound foolish”. Clever in trivial matters but foolish in important ones. Literally, “Minor cunning, major folly”.

Frequency

小黠大痴 Pronunciation and Pinyin

小黠大痴 Character Breakdown

Stroke Order

Character	Pinyin	Strokes	Meaning
小	xiǎo	3	small, little, young, minor
黠	xiá	18	clever and cunning
大	dà	3	large, big, great
痴	chī	13	foolish, obsessed, or mad

Example Sentence with 小黠大痴

他总是为了节省几块钱而跑遍好几家商店，却在投资大笔资金时轻易相信别人的片面之词，真是小黠大痴

He always goes to several stores to save a few dollars, yet easily trusts others' one-sided advice when investing large sums of money; he's truly penny wise and pound foolish.

Origin and Story of 小黠大痴

During the Tang Dynasty, on the last day of the first lunar month, the local official Han Yu in Henan wrote an essay titled "Song Qiong Wen" (Sending Away Poverty) as people observed the tradition of "sending away the poor."

He referred to five kinds of "poverty ghosts": intellectual poverty, academic poverty, literary poverty, fate poverty, and social poverty.

These five ghosts immediately retorted, saying, "You know my name, and for all that I do, you drive me away. This is minor cunning and major folly. How long does a human life last? I will establish your name, which will be imperishable for a hundred generations."