See may you live in interesting times in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"etymology_text": "Popularly attributed to Chinese, but this is apocryphal; the true origin is unclear. Its closest Chinese equivalent is 寧為太平犬,不做亂世人 (\"better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos\"). Its earliest known use is in 1936 by Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, British ambassador to China, who purported hearing the phrase. See May you live in interesting times § Origins on Wikipedia.",
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"A sardonic curse disguised as well-wishing, where interesting times refers to trouble."
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Download raw JSONL data for may you live in interesting times meaning in English (1.3kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-09-20 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-09-02 using wiktextract (d6fca27 and 65e1673). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.