DICTIONARY · CC-CEDICT

老底

Mandarin · pinyin lǎo dǐ

(coll.) one's past history (esp. embarrassing or private details)

Full entryShow on map

Characters in this entry

老: lǎo · old, aged; experienced; Kangxi radical 125
底: dǐ · bottom, underneath, underside

Written characters and their own readings; the entry’s pronunciation is shown above.

Explore the spelling

Mandarin tones

3–3 · lao3 di3

Compare attested words with these syllables ↗

Dictionary tones. Connected speech can change their realization.

Connected dictionary

2character links

Explore word families ↗Compare pronunciations ↗Open character structure ↗

Counts describe dictionary records, not word frequency or semantic similarity. Source identities stay separate.

Read this spelling in Classical texts

Follow a written form into the eight pinned witnesses: Analects, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi, Sunzi and the Mao Shijing. A match is a place to investigate; it does not prove that a modern dictionary sense fits the passage.

老底 · find source passages ↗

Explore Classical grammar ↗

Compare dictionary sources Wiktionary

Wiktionary English definitions · Chinese section

Independent source senses for this spelling, with usage labels retained. Not matched to the pronunciation above.

noun

(colloquial) one's (unsavoury) past; one's personal background
(colloquial) ancestral estate
(obsolete, colloquial, non-face-to-face) one's own father

noun

(Longyan Min) the past; past times; former times

Source page · dump 2026-09-02 · Contributors & history

Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source & license · Data pack