Chinese Name Generator

Chinese names are surname first and short: one syllable of family name, then one or two syllables of given name. Wang Wei is family Wang, given Wei. There is no middle name and no space in the Chinese original — the whole thing is two or three characters.

The surname stock is tiny. Roughly a hundred surnames cover the great majority of the population, and the top three — Wang 王, Li 李 and Zhang 张 — account for something like a fifth of it on their own. This is the opposite of the given-name situation, and it is why Chinese introductions so often start with the given name.

Given names are not selected from a fixed list of "names" at all. Parents choose characters, weighing meaning, sound, tone contour, stroke count, and how the whole thing reads next to the surname. That is why a Chinese given name is almost always transparent — Wei 伟 is "great", Ming 明 is "bright", Xue 雪 is "snow", Lan 兰 is "orchid" — and why the same syllable can be a completely different name depending on which character was used. Romanised as "Yan", the name might be 燕 "swallow" or 艳 "gorgeous" or 岩 "cliff".

Older families use a generation name, 字辈. One character of the two-character given name is fixed for everyone of the same generation in the lineage, taken in sequence from a poem written into the clan genealogy. Siblings and cousins therefore share half a name — Zhenhua, Zhenguo, Zhenming — and you can place a person in the family tree from the name alone. The practice has faded in the mainland since the one-child policy but survives in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the diaspora.

Two practical notes for writers. Single-character given names (Wang Wei, Li Na) read as slightly more formal or northern; two-character names are the majority. And an adopted English name is not a translation — a Chinese colleague called Kevin Zhang has a Chinese given name that has nothing to do with "Kevin"; he picked the English one himself, usually in a school English class.