刻鹄类鹜 — Chinese idiom
刻鹄类鹜
kè hú lèi wù
Traditional: 刻鵠類鶩
Meaning
- to aim to carve a swan and get a semblance of a duck
- to fail utterly in trying to copy something
- to get a reasonably good, if not perfect, result
Character by character
- 刻kèto carve, to engrave; a quarter hour; a moment
- 鹄húswan
- 类lèicategory, class, group, kind; similar to; to resem
- 鹜wùduck
Idioms sharing a character
- 一刻千金 yī kè qiān jīn
- 一时半刻 yī shí bàn kè
- 刻舟求剑 kè zhōu qiú jiàn
- 刻苦耐劳 kè kǔ nài láo
- 刻薄寡恩 kè bó guǎ ēn
- 刻骨相思 kè gǔ xiāng sī
- 刻骨铭心 kè gǔ míng xīn
- 无时无刻 wú shí wú kè
- 精雕细刻 jīng diāo xì kè
- 铭心刻骨 míng xīn kè gǔ
Data: CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0); Unihan Database (Unicode License v3). Retrieved 2026-10-22.