Words and terms
The word you are looking for, in Chinese and in English
Two kinds of people land on a page like this. One of them knows the Chinese and needs something they can type out for a colleague who does not; the other heard a word at a family dinner or saw it on a shelf and wants to know what it was. Both directions are below — and one thing worth saying before you start, because word lists rarely do: for several of these there is no correct English, only the wording somebody picked. Where the wording is ours, we say so.
How to read the entries
Each term below is followed by its romanisation, then by a tag on the English wording. The tag is doing real work, so it is worth thirty seconds:
- ⟨in circulation⟩
- You will meet this wording outside this site — on seller listings, or in English writing about the subject. We have not counted how common it is.
- ⟨ours⟩
- This is the wording we use on this site. We are not claiming we invented it; we are telling you it is not a standard you can cite.
- ⟨no settled English⟩
- We could not find a settled English wording at all. What follows is a description, not a translation.
Romanisation is Mandarin pinyin, written without tone marks. Where a Cantonese reading appears as well, it is the spelling we already use in our own page addresses — those have no tone numbers either, and we would rather reuse a spelling we have published than invent one.
Every entry links to one page, and only one: the page on this site where that term is actually explained. If a term you are looking for is not here, it is because we have not explained it yet.
Words for the paper and the packet
- 衣紙 yi zhi · Cantonese ji zi
-
⟨in circulation⟩joss paper
The general word for the whole category, and the one most likely to land if you are asking a person rather than pointing at a shelf. If you are heading to a shop, we made a card of characters to point at — this one and four others, with the tone-marked spellings we have already published.
- 元寶 yuan bao
-
⟨ours⟩folded paper ingots
Paper folded into the boat shape of old currency, and often folded by hand rather than bought ready-made. English has no one-word noun for the object, so we describe it instead of naming it.
- 往生錢 wang sheng qian
-
⟨ours⟩rebirth money
Sheets printed with a Buddhist dhāraṇī instead of a denomination, so what they send is merit rather than cash. Rebirth money is our rendering; we did not find a settled English name for it.
- 溪錢 xi qian
-
⟨ours⟩loose “stream” paper money
Thin scattering sheets that go into a packet loose rather than folded. They are in all four of the packets our shop packs — so are most of the contents; what changes between packets is the clothes, the shoes and the lotus flowers.
- 附薦袋 · 衣包 fu jian dai · yi bao · Cantonese ji baau
-
⟨no settled English⟩— we call it the offering packet
A printed paper bag with a handle: the names go on the front, and everything else goes inside it. The overseas sellers we searched in 2026 listed the contents and not the bag.
- 靈寶大法司
-
⟨no settled English⟩
Five characters in the seal printed on the gold band down the front of a packet. Lingbao names a Daoist tradition; what the five read as a phrase, we could not find an authoritative gloss for, so we are not going to hand you a translation of it.
Words you write, not words you say
- 上款 · 下款 shang kuan · xia kuan
-
⟨ours⟩the recipient line / the sender line
The two named columns on the front of a packet: who it is going to, and who it is from. A third column carries a date, and it is not the date most people expect it to be.
- 先父 · 先妣 xian fu · xian bi
-
⟨ours⟩my late father / my late mother
The honorifics that open the recipient line. Nobody says these out loud — they belong to writing, which is why a fluent speaker can still be meeting them for the first time.
- 陽居 yang ju
-
⟨no settled English⟩— we describe it as living, on the yang side
It marks the sender as still alive. Anyone meeting it for the first time has no way of knowing that, and you will usually meet it inside a longer phrase such as 陽居眾子女付, roughly “sent by the living children”.
- 〇門堂上歷代祖先
-
⟨no settled English⟩— our gloss: the generations of the [surname] family
The one recipient line that asks for a surname and then stops. Families who could name every generation use it routinely, so reaching for it says nothing about how much you know.
Words for who the offering is addressed to
- 冤親債主 yuan qin zhai zhu · Cantonese jyun can zaai zyu Simplified: 冤亲债主
-
⟨in circulation⟩karmic creditors
The rendering you will meet is karmic creditors. Whether those two English words carry the four Chinese ones is a longer argument, and we made it on its own page.
- 十方眾生 shi fang zhong sheng · Cantonese sap fong zung sang
-
⟨ours⟩all beings of the ten directions
Ten directions is Buddhist shorthand for the whole compass plus above and below. Used as the name of a packet, it means the recipient list was left open on purpose.
- 燒街衣 shao jie yi
-
⟨ours⟩“burning street clothes” — a literal translation; the clothes are paper, like everything else in the packet
The Hong Kong name for the version that happens outside — in a doorway or by the kerb, for whoever passes, instead of in front of the family’s own photographs. What the name records is the place, not the contents.
- 神主牌 shen zhu pai
-
⟨in circulation⟩ancestral tablet
A wooden plaque carrying the name — one of three objects in the full home set-up, with a censer and a table. A photograph stands in for it in a lot of households abroad, and that is not a downgrade.
Words for the rite
- 祭祖 ji zu — 家祭 jia ji · 墓祭 mu ji · 祠祭 ci ji
-
⟨ours⟩making an offering to ancestors — at home, at the grave, at the lineage hall
One word covering three places it can be done, each with its own name. None of the three is labelled the real one with the other two attached as substitutes.
- 附薦 · 附薦棚 fu jian · fu jian peng
-
⟨no settled English⟩— our reading: having a name added to a rite someone else is conducting
The second word names an actual structure on Hong Kong Yu Lan festival grounds, where residents can have their own family’s dead entered into the public rite. Reading the two characters on their own is our reading rather than a definition we could source, and we would rather label it than let it pass.
Words for the days
- 清明 qing ming · Cantonese cing ming
-
⟨in circulation⟩Qingming · Ching Ming · Cheng Beng · Tomb Sweeping Day
One day, several spellings: Qingming is the Mandarin one, Ching Ming the Hong Kong and Macau one, Cheng Beng the Hokkien one used in Malaysia and Singapore. If a search near you comes back empty, try another spelling before deciding there is nothing.
- 掃墓 · 拜山 sao mu · Cantonese baai saan
-
⟨in circulation⟩grave-sweeping
The errand itself: going to the grave, clearing it, making the offering there. 掃墓 is the form our sources quote (Chinese Wikipedia 〈掃墓〉); 拜山 is the Cantonese one, and the one our own Chinese-language pages use.
- 重陽 chong yang · Cantonese cung joeng
-
⟨in circulation⟩Chung Yeung · Double Ninth
The autumn grave visit; Qingming in spring is its other half rather than a repeat of it. Chung Yeung is the Cantonese reading Hong Kong uses; Double Ninth translates the date, the ninth day of the ninth lunar month.
- 中元節 · 盂蘭 · 普渡 zhong yuan jie · Cantonese jyu laan · pu du
-
⟨in circulation⟩Hungry Ghost Festival
Different names for the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, inherited from traditions that had nothing to do with one another. Yu Lan is the Cantonese reading; Zhongyuan and Pudu are Mandarin, and none of them is more correct than the others.
- 忌日 · 忌辰 ji ri · ji chen · Cantonese gei san
-
⟨in circulation⟩death anniversary
Two written forms of the same thing. What the first character actually means is the surprise on that page, and it changes what the day is supposed to be.
- 死忌 · 生忌 si ji · sheng ji
-
⟨no settled English⟩— the death anniversary / the birthday kept after a death
Two observances of the same shape, on two different dates. English has death anniversary for the first and nothing short for the second, which is why 生忌 tends to get explained rather than translated.
Several of these are not research. 元寶, 溪錢, 往生錢, 七言咒, a seven-character mantra sheet, the gold and silver that is folded by hand, and a pair of old-style paper shoes are things our sister counts into a packet — and a pet packet takes nine small lotus flowers where the clothes and the shoes would be. That is our own shop’s packing, given by the person who does it, and some of the rest of this page we know only because we asked her or our mother.
One entry is the opposite kind. 靈寶大法司, the five characters in the seal, is one we tried to source in the literature and could not — so it sits in the list untranslated rather than filled in.
Words that sit next to these without belonging to them
ancestor money. If you have been searching in English you will have met this phrase, and it most often refers to something else: in the search results we read, the phrase belongs to Hoodoo, an African American tradition. We have not studied it and are not going to summarise it here — we only note that it is not this.
How we know, and how far it goes: on 19 September 2026 we read search-result titles and summaries, on one search engine, in one country, without opening the pages. That is enough to support most often. It is not enough to support always, so we are not writing always, and we are not putting a percentage on it.
If a word here was the thing in the way
Sometimes the thing in the way is just not knowing what it is called. If you would rather hand the packet itself to someone, we do that part.
See the offerings