Chinese Baby Names

Chinese given names work differently from most Western names. They are built from one or two characters chosen for their meaning and sound, and the same romanized spelling can stand for many different characters. Mei can mean beautiful, An can mean peace, Jin can mean gold and Long can mean dragon, but each of these depends on the character a family chooses. That is why it helps to know which characters you have in mind, not just the spelling.

Chinese is a tonal language, and the tone changes the meaning as much as the letters do. The spellings on this page mostly follow pinyin, the standard system for writing Mandarin in the Latin alphabet. Short, single-syllable names such as Jun, Han, Shan, Tai and Bao are easy to say in English and sit comfortably alongside both Chinese and Western surnames. Lian is often linked with the lotus, and Shan with mountains.

In China, the family name comes first and the given name follows, so a full name reads in the opposite order from English. If you are giving a Chinese name in an English-speaking setting, consider asking a fluent speaker or a family elder to help you select characters with a meaning and tone that suit your child.