General
Information is from dictionaries and other sources. Pinyin reflects Mandarin pronunciation; for some dialect names, it is no more than a polite fiction. Korean glosses are tentative. Comments and corrections welcome. Hover over Green Lettering to see additional information.
The wood swallow is not a particularly familiar bird to most Chinese, occurring in the far south. It is ornithologically known as a 燕 'swallow-shrike', based on English 'swallow-shrike'. The name of the Ashy Woodswallow in the earliest ornithological list to feature Chinese names was 灰色燕伯劳 'grey-coloured swallow-shrike'. The modern ornithological name is a simplification of this involving the substitution of
, an old literary name for the shrikes, for 伯劳 'shrike'. (Note: The Simplified character set has 䴗, based on 鶪, as the character for 'shrike', but ornithologists prefer the non-standard simplification
, based on 鵙).
Species names
SCIENTIFIC & ENGLISH |
CHINESE |
EAST |
SOUTH |
NORTH |
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Artamus | ||||||||
Latin |
English |
Chinese |
Chinese (Taiwan) |
Other Ch |
Japanese |
Korean |
Vietnamese |
Mongolian |
Artamus fuscus![]() |
Ashy woodswallow Ashy wood swallow Ashy swallow shrike |
灰燕鵙 (灰燕鵙) 'grey swallow-shrike' |
灰身了我 (灰身了我) 'grey shenliaowo' (meaning and reading unclear) 灰色燕伯劳 (灰色燕伯勞) 'grey-coloured swallow-shrike' (early ornithological) (35) 灰伯劳 (灰伯勞) 'grey shrike' |
ハイイロモリツバメ (灰色森燕) hai-iro mori-tsubame 'grey forest-swallow' |
Chim Nhạn rừng 'forest-swallow (bird)' (12, 13, 34) |