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Chinese Middle Names

80 Chinese names with meanings, Pinyin and plain-English pronunciation — and a clear account of why the middle character in a Chinese name is not a middle name.

Chinese names run surname first. In Wang Xiaoming, Wang is the family name, and Xiaoming is the given name; it is not a first name called Wang. Surnames are almost always one character, and the given name is one or two. That is the whole structure. There is no third slot, and nothing in the Chinese system corresponds to what an English-speaking country puts on the middle line of a birth certificate.

What people mistake for one is the first character of a two-character given name, and in traditional families that character often has a specific job: it is the generation name, zibei or banci. Every member of one generation of a lineage — brothers, sisters in some clans, and all the same-generation male cousins — receives the same character, drawn in order from a generational poem written into the clan genealogy. The second character is the individual one. So in a family where the generation character is Jian, the brothers might be Jianguo, Jianhua and Jianping, and their cousins the same, and the shared Jian tells you instantly which rung of the lineage each stands on. That character is not a middle name in any sense that transfers: it was not chosen for the child, it is not optional, and it is inseparable from the other half of the given name. Nobody is called Xiaoming with Xiao as a middle name; Xiaoming is one name. The system has thinned considerably since the mid-twentieth century, particularly under the one-child policy, and most given names chosen in China today are simply two characters picked for sound and meaning — but plenty of living people still carry a generation character, and it is worth knowing what it is before you borrow it. Our traditions guide sets it beside the Korean dollimja, which works the same way.

The single most consequential fact for anyone choosing from a romanized list is that meaning lives in the character, not in the syllable. Pinyin is a pronunciation system, and each syllable maps to dozens of unrelated characters. Li can be 李, the plum tree and one of the most common surnames on earth; 力, strength; 丽, beautiful; 立, to stand; or 理, reason. Ming can be 明, bright, made of the sun and the moon side by side; or 铭, to inscribe; or 名, name. Yu can be 玉, jade, or 雨, rain, or 宇, the vault of the sky. Mandarin also has four tones plus a neutral one, and romanization written without tone marks throws that information away, so the same spelling can be four different words before you even choose the character. This is why a list of Chinese names with one confident meaning attached to each is always a simplification. If there is a Chinese-literate relative in the family, ask them to choose the characters; that is where the name actually gets made. If not, choose the sound and the most common association, and say so plainly rather than claiming a meaning the paperwork does not carry.

Pinyin also needs about five minutes of teaching, because its letters do not do what English letters do. X is roughly "sh" but lighter and further forward, so Xin is "sheen" and Xue is "shweh." Q is roughly "ch," so Qing is "ching" and Qiu is "cho." Zh is a hard "j," so Zhang is "jahng." C is "ts," as in "cats," so Cao is "tsow." Z is "dz." R is close to the s in "measure" with the tongue curled back. And the vowel written -i after zh, ch, sh, r, z, c and s is not "ee" at all but a buzz in the throat: Zhi is closer to "jr" than to "jee," and Si is "sz," which is why Americans mangle it. Two other romanizations are still in circulation and both are legitimate. Wade-Giles, the older Western system, gives Chiang for Jiang, Tsingtao for Qingdao, and Hsiao for Xiao — and Xiao is also spelled Shao and Siao in various family spellings. Cantonese romanizations produce a different set altogether from the same characters: Chan for Chen, Wong for Wang, Lee for Li, Chow for Zhou, Ng for a surname that Mandarin renders Wu. A Hong Kong family and a Beijing family with the same character can have surnames that look nothing alike.

For a Chinese American family, the workable pattern is an English first name with the Chinese given name in the middle slot, written closed or as two words: Emily Meiling Chen, or Emily Mei Ling Chen. Hong Kong and Singaporean families often use a three-part version — English name, romanized Chinese given name, surname — which is why Jackie Chan appears as Chan Kong-sang on Chinese-language records. Keep the Chinese name whole in the middle slot rather than splitting one two-character name across the first and middle lines, and if the family uses a generation character, resist the urge to drop it, because that character is the one part of the name that belongs to the cousins too.

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Pairing rule for Chinese middles: the one-syllable names are the ones that work hardest, and they need help from the names on either side. Mei, Yu, Li and Kai are single beats with no internal shape, so between a one-beat first name and a one-beat surname they vanish — Grace Mei Wu is three thuds. Give a monosyllabic Chinese middle a longer first name (Charlotte Mei Wu, Sebastian Kai Lin) or use the closed two-character form instead (Grace Meiling Wu). And watch the seam with Chinese surnames specifically: a middle ending in -n or -ng before Lin, Ling, Wang or Ning stacks nasals until the whole name hums. Xin Lin and Jing Ning are both unusable for that reason.

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Nearby origins: Vietnamese, whose Sino-Vietnamese names share these roots, plus Korean and Japanese, or all 24 origin lists. For carrying a generation character alongside an English name, see honoring family and two middle names. By style, most of these are one-syllable middles; the method is in the guide.