How to Choose Chinese Name Characters for a Baby

Picking two characters for a name that will carry a person for eighty years is the hardest naming decision most families will make. This guide is about the part that usually does not get written down, how to actually narrow the field. It assumes you have already decided on the meaning you want the name to carry, and now you need the characters that do that job without falling apart later.

Start with the tone pattern

A name has to sound good next to the family name, and in most of the common family surnames the last character is a falling tone. If your surname is falling, a rising second character followed by a falling name character reads with the most natural weight. This is not a hard rule, but it is the first screen: say the full name out loud five times, in the order surname then given name, and listen for where the sound lands. The name that has to be enunciated to work is the wrong one.

Choose meaning that ages

The characters you pick are the ones a seventy-year-old will be introduced as. A character that means brave and bright is a character that works at three and at seventy. A character that means young and fresh stops working at twenty-five. This is the difference between a name that is a good sound and a name that is a good life. When you find two characters you like, test each one in a full sentence about the person. If the character only works in a poem, it is decoration. If it works in plain speech, it is the name.

Check the pair, not just each character

A name is two characters held together, and some pairs read as a single word that means something neither character means alone. That is usually the good kind of pairing. The bad kind is the pair that, put together, sounds like a common noun, like door or table. Say the two characters together, the way a stranger would, and make sure the compound is not a word you do not want the person to be called.

Before you put the name on a card

Run the name through a search, both as pinyin and as characters, and see what comes up. A name that returns a popular character actor or a major brand on the first page is a name the person will spend years correcting. See the Name & Meaning category for the consultation that walks through tone, meaning and age on the specific characters you have shortlisted.