Chinese idiom · 成语
鸡鸣狗吠
Meaning
Roosters crowing and dogs barking; the familiar sounds of inhabited rural life.
Character by character
Origin and story
Descriptive expressionMencius (孟子), in Gongsun Chou I (公孫丑上), uses the sounds of roosters and dogs carrying from place to place as an image of inhabited settlements extending across a state. The expression also appears in Wang Lang’s biography in Sanguo Zhi (三國志), volume 13.
There is no separate rooster-and-dog adventure behind this wording. It evokes ordinary domestic life through familiar sounds. In modern descriptions it can suggest a rural community, but the words themselves do not guarantee that the setting is peaceful or prosperous; that comes from the surrounding sentence.
Sources and further reading
In everyday life
清晨走进村子，鸡鸣狗吠，几户人家的厨房已经冒起了炊烟。
Walking into the village at dawn, we heard roosters and dogs, and smoke was already rising from several kitchens.
A descriptive scene of inhabited rural life; not the same idiom as 鸡鸣狗盗.