腰斬 Save Sign in to save words Simplified: 腰斩 yāozhǎn ㄧㄠ ㄓㄢˇ to chop sb in half at the waist (capital punishment) to cut sth in half to reduce sth by a dramatic margin to terminate to cut short Character by character 腰(yāo)the waist and lower back 斬(zhǎn)behead Other words read yāozhǎn yaozhan with other tones 搖戰 Often confused with yaozhan 要賬 A Chinese word or character, or English Search Sources CC-CEDICT, CC BY-SA 4.0 pinyinjs, Apache-2.0