To spoil something through impatience
The gap between those first two lines is the whole point of a chengyu. It is quoted whole, never assembled, and the literal reading is a picture from the story below rather than a definition — which is why translating the four characters one at a time rarely gets you there.
How our dictionary glosses it
Spoil or damage by being too helpful — full dictionary entry.
A man of Song thought his rice seedlings were coming up too slowly, so he spent a day tugging each one a little higher. He came home exhausted and pleased with himself. His son ran out to the field the next morning and found every seedling dead.
Source: 《孟子》Mencius, 4th century BC
The reading shown is the one each character takes inside this idiom — chengyu keep older readings, so it is not always the everyday one. The meanings are read from the same dictionary that powers the translators.
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拔苗助长 is pronounced bá miáo zhù zhǎng and means to spoil something through impatience. Literally it says "pull up the sprouts to help them grow" — like most chengyu, the literal reading is a picture from a story rather than a definition.
《孟子》Mencius, 4th century BC. A man of Song thought his rice seedlings were coming up too slowly, so he spent a day tugging each one a little higher. He came home exhausted and pleased with himself. His son ran out to the field the next morning and found every seedling dead.
bá miáo zhù zhǎng. Press the audio button on this page to hear it spoken by a native voice. Tones here are citation tones, so 一 is written yī even where it is said yí in running speech.
拔 (bá) Pull out (select - raise), 苗 (miáo) Seedling (young - descendant), 助 (zhù) Help (assist), 长 (zhǎng) Long (length); Older (chief). These meanings come from the same dictionary as the translators on this site, and the reading shown is the one the character takes inside this idiom.
Yes. Chengyu are not archaic — they are ordinary educated speech, and they turn up in conversation, newspapers and exams. This one sits in the beginner band, which reflects how common it is and how hard its characters are.
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Every idiom here comes with the story it was compressed from — that is the rule for being listed, and it is why they stick.
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