Interesting Meanings behind those Chinese Surnames

Interesting Meanings behind those Chinese Surnames

Arsenal Manager, Arsene Wenger in Beijing, with his supporters showing his name in Chinese.

Chinese characters can be seen as a vast resource of literature whose volume is about 100 thousand. However, compared with the huge size of characters, the amount of surnames used in China is thought as only around 4000, which is far smaller than the total vocabulary.

Nowadays a typical Chinese surname applies one or two characters. Therefore the length a full Chinese name varies from two to four characters. Here comes some names of Chinese celebrities as examples: the pianist Lang Lang (郎朗, 2 characters); “Chairman Mao”-Mao Zedong (毛泽东, 3 characters), the calligrapher Ouyang Zhongshi (欧阳中石, 4 characters).

Chinese Pianist Lang Lang

Behind those common-used surnames, various interesting meanings can be perceived and sometimes have particular effects when people are introduced to their new friends.

For examples: beautiful flowers like “梅” (Méi), Plum Blossom, “桂” (Gùi), Sweet Osmanthus, “兰” (Lán), Orchid, etc.

Ordinary animals like “马” (Mǎ), horse, “牛” (Niú), ox, “骆” (Luò), camel, are shared by plenty of families.

Even adjectives such as “母” (Mǔ), female and “公” (Gōng) male as gender marks are chosen, quite particular indeed. By the way, here these two cannot indicate their actual genders!

More introductions will be available soon, as I finished my statistics class recently, which often drove me mad before…XD