Chinese Name Generator

What the Chinese name generator does

Say you want a Chinese name. Maybe for a character, maybe for a game, maybe for a class where the teacher told everyone to pick one.

This gives you Chinese names in the Latin alphabet. Pull one, or pull a batch and read down.

And then stay a bit, because Chinese names are built on an idea that English does not have anywhere, and once you see it you will not be able to unsee it in the list.

How to use it

Choose a number, press Generate, and a fresh set appears. Press Copy to keep them.

In Chinese, the word for the people is the hundred surnames

Start with a piece of vocabulary, because it does more work than any explanation I could write.

The everyday Chinese word for ordinary people, the public, regular folks, the ones who are not officials or emperors, is 老百姓. Lǎobǎixìng.

It means old hundred surnames.

Read that again. Not people. Not citizens. Not the public. The hundred surnames. When a Chinese speaker says the common people, the words coming out of their mouth are a reference to a list of family names.

There is a shorter version too, 百姓, bǎixìng, hundred surnames, and it means the same thing. The population and the surname list are the same noun.

English has nothing like this. We do not call ourselves the Smiths and Joneses when we mean everybody. But in Chinese the idea is so old and so settled that nobody notices it any more. It is just the word.

And it is not a figure of speech that drifted. It is close to arithmetic. China runs on a startlingly small number of surnames. Wang, Li, Zhang, Liu, Chen, and the pile flattens out fast after that. A country of well over a billion people shares a surname pool that a patient person could sit down and learn. Read the list on this page and you will meet Zhang and Li and Liu and Wang and Yang over and over, and that is not us running out of ideas. That is what a Chinese classroom register looks like.

So when Chinese calls the population the hundred surnames, it is not being poetic. It is being accurate, and slightly generous with the hundred.

The book that taught China to read

Somewhere around the tenth century, in the early years of the Song dynasty, somebody wrote the surnames down.

The book is called 百家姓, the Hundred Family Surnames, and nobody knows who made it. It is a rhyming poem, and the whole thing is just surnames, one after another, arranged so they scan and so a child can chant them.

The title lies a bit, in the way titles do. It carries several hundred surnames, most of one character and some of two, and hundred here means many, the same way we say a thousand times.

But here is the part I love. This was not a reference book. It was a reading primer. It is how children learned to read.

Which makes complete sense once you remember that Chinese has no alphabet. An English child learns twenty six letters and then, in principle, can sound out any word on earth. A Chinese child has no such shortcut. Characters have to be learned one at a time, by the hundred, before a sentence is possible at all.

So you give them surnames. Every child already knows their own. Every child knows the neighbours'. The characters are common, they are short, they are already in the kid's head as sounds, and a rhyming poem makes them stick. For roughly a thousand years, this is where Chinese literacy started. Not with a story. With a list of families.

And then there is the first line.

The book does not open with the most common surname. It opens with Zhao. Then Qian, then Sun, then Li.

Zhao was the surname of the imperial family of the Song dynasty. Qian belonged to the kings of Wuyue, the neighbouring realm that had recently come under Song rule.

So the first thing a child in Song China learned to read was, in order, the emperor, then the local king who had just submitted to him, and then everybody else. A reading primer that opens with a loyalty statement, memorised by chanting, by every child, for a thousand years.

Nobody had to explain the hierarchy. You learned it while learning your letters.

Taking a Chinese name apart

Take Zhang Wei off the list.

Zhang is the surname and it comes first. That is not a stylistic choice about how to write it in English. That is the order. Family, then person. The group you belong to is announced before the individual you happen to be, and Chinese has done it that way for as long as there have been Chinese names.

Wei is the given name, and this is where it gets different from English.

An English given name is chosen off a shelf. There is a stock of them, they have been circulating for centuries, and your parents picked one. James was not invented for you. It arrived pre-owned.

A Chinese given name is not picked off a shelf. It is written. Parents choose characters, for what they mean, and assemble a name out of them. Wei can mean great. Ming means bright. Mei is beautiful. Rui is sharp, or clever. Jing is quiet, or still.

So Zhang Wei is not the Chinese equivalent of John Smith. Structurally it is closer to Smith Great. The surname is inherited and the given name is a small piece of writing about who your parents hoped you would be.

This is also why the surname pool is tiny and the given name pool is effectively infinite. One half of the name is handed down and cannot change. The other half is composed fresh, every time, for every child, out of a language with tens of thousands of characters.

The name is one inheritance and one invention, stapled together, in that order.

The middle character that tells you which cousin you are

Here is one more layer, and it is the one that tends to genuinely surprise people.

In a lot of Chinese families, especially traditionally, a two character given name is not two free choices. One of the characters belongs to you. The other belongs to your generation.

Every cousin born in your generation, across the whole extended clan, shares that character. Your father's generation had a different one. Your children will have another.

So you can meet a total stranger, hear their name, and know that they are your generational equal, or that they are somehow, despite being sixty years old, junior to you. The name says it out loud.

And where did the sequence come from? A poem. Clans wrote one, and stored it in the family genealogy, and the characters of that poem were handed out one generation at a time, in order.

Sit with that. A family writes a poem. Then it spends the next several centuries slowly reading it aloud, one word per generation, using its own children. Each child carries a syllable of a verse that nobody alive has ever heard finished.

It is one of the loveliest ideas in any naming system anywhere, and English does not have a single thing like it.

What the alphabet cannot carry

The names on this page are in pinyin, which is the standard way of writing Chinese in the Latin alphabet.

Pinyin is good. It is precise, it was designed carefully, and it is what China itself uses. But when you strip the little marks off the top, which is what happens everywhere on the English speaking internet, something goes missing.

Mandarin is tonal. The pitch you say a syllable on is not decoration or mood, it is part of the word, the same way a consonant is. Say ma flat and high and it is mother. Say it rising and it is hemp. Say it dipping down and back up and it is horse. Say it falling sharply and you are scolding someone.

Four completely unrelated words. One spelling.

There is a Ma in this list, and it is the horse one. Say it in the wrong tone and you have called somebody's mother.

It goes further than that with surnames. Wang, written one way, is a common surname that also happens to be the character for king. Written another way, and said on a different pitch, it is a completely separate surname belonging to a completely separate set of families. In Chinese they are not remotely the same word. In the English alphabet they are both just Wang, and there is nothing the letters can do about it.

So a Chinese name in Latin letters is a bit like a photograph of a piece of music. Everything is there except the thing that makes it work.

None of which is a reason not to use one. Just know what you are holding. The characters are the name, the tones are the sound, and the spelling is a handle bolted onto the outside so English speakers have something to grab.

Where this list comes from

Nothing clever, and that is deliberate.

Every name here was researched and vetted by hand, one by one, before it went in the list. Press Generate and you get a random draw, with no repeats inside a single batch. Surnames that are actually common in China, given names that are actually used, in the order Chinese actually uses.

It runs entirely on your side, and nothing you enter goes anywhere.

Where English speakers get it wrong

Keep the order. Surname first. Chinese people writing in English keep it that way, the press keeps it that way, and it has never been the thing that flips for foreigners the way Japanese did. Zhang Wei, not Wei Zhang.

Do not add a middle name. There is no such slot. If a Chinese name has three syllables, it is a one character surname and a two character given name, and those two characters are one name, not a first and a middle. Splitting them is like splitting Mary Anne into Mary the first name and Anne the spare.

Watch the era and the politics. Given names date hard, and in China they date against history. Names built from the vocabulary of the fifties and sixties, the ones about building and liberating and defending, sit on a person born in that decade and nowhere else. A character born in 2003 will not have one.

Say it out loud to somebody, if you can. Not for the tones, you will not get those from a page of letters. For the shape. Pinyin has some spellings that ambush English speakers, and it is better to find that out before it is in print.

And if this is going on a real person. A name off a list is a sound. The name is the characters. Pick those with somebody who reads Chinese, because a name that means something slightly wrong is a thing a person carries for a lifetime, and it will not be visible to you at all.

Questions people ask

Which part is the surname?

The first one. Chinese puts the family name in front, always, and unlike Japan it has never switched that around for English. In Zhang Wei, Zhang is the family.

Why do the same surnames keep coming back?

Because that is China. The surname pool is genuinely small, and a handful of names cover an enormous share of the population. A list that gave you a fresh surname every time would be a less accurate list, not a better one.

Do Chinese names mean something?

The given name almost always does, because it was assembled out of chosen characters rather than picked off a shelf. The surname usually does too, but nobody is thinking about it, in the same way an English speaker named Smith is not thinking about a forge.

Which are men's names and which are women's?

Some characters lean strongly, and a Chinese speaker would read the lean immediately. In the Latin alphabet a lot of that signal is gone, because it lives in the character rather than the sound. Treat it as missing rather than as neutral.

Can I pick a Chinese name for myself?

People do it constantly, and it is normal, especially for students and anyone working with Chinese colleagues. The advice from every Chinese person who has ever had to sit through this is the same: get help. Choosing your own characters, from a language you do not read, using a dictionary, is exactly how people end up named something well meaning and unfortunate.

References

1. Hundred Family Surnames (百家姓). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Family_Surnames
2. Sturman, N. The Hundred Families' Surnames, Bai Jia Xing, translated and annotated. https://www.angelfire.com/ns/pingyaozhuan/baijiaxing.html
3. Bai Jia Xing: The Hundred Surnames. YellowBridge. https://www.yellowbridge.com/onlinelit/baijiaxing.php
4. Baixing (百姓). https://grokipedia.com/page/Baixing