Random Chinese Name Generator

How this list was compiled: Family names: the 'Surname list' table of English Wikipedia's 'List of common Chinese surnames' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_Chinese_surnames, wiki text read 2026-09-30), which says it follows the Ministry of Public Security's yearly report on the 100 most common surnames in mainland China, the newest in its table being the report for 2019. Listed: ranks 1 to 100 of that table, each with a band (top 10, top 50, top 100); the rank and the population are not printed, because the terms of the report were not read. A card gives the simplified character, the traditional form where it differs (37 of the 100), the pinyin with tone marks and the Hong Kong Cantonese spelling from the table's columns. 53 family cards add what the character means as an everyday word; this is not the origin of the surname, which is often an old state or place, and it is printed only where the gloss is a plain common word, our choice, and the word is found in the character's definitions. Given names: the Ministry of Public Security's '二〇二〇年全国姓名报告' (National Name Report for 2020), published on gov.cn on 8 February 2021 (https://www.gov.cn/fuwu/2021-02/08/content_5585906.htm; the live address returned an error on 2026-09-30, so the Internet Archive's copy was read that day: https://web.archive.org/web/2021/http://www.gov.cn/fuwu/2021-02/08/content_5585906.htm). Listed: every name in its Table 4, the ten names most used for men and for women born in or before 1959 and in each decade from the 1960s to the 2010s, and the ten names most used for boys and for girls born in 2020 and registered by 31 December 2020, which the report gives in its text. Table 4 is a picture: it was read by eye, twice, and then compared by script with the transcription in Chinese Wikipedia's '最常見名字列表' (read 2026-09-30); they differ in 2 cells: 德明 here, 徳明 there; 梓萱 here, 梓宣 there, where the picture was followed. A card names the decades, not the place in the ten. The report counts the household-registered population of mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan not included. Sex is the report's column; 1 name is on both the boys' and the girls' list of the 2010s and has one card (Zǐhán 子涵). Pinyin of given names is ours, one reading per character, the usual one; a script checked on 2026-09-30 that every syllable on every card, family names too, is a Mandarin reading recorded for that character in the Unicode Han Database (Unihan_Readings.txt, Unicode 18.0, https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/Unihan.zip, downloaded 2026-09-30). The meaning of each character is a short gloss of ours; the same script checked that each gloss word stands in the character's definitions on English Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org, CC BY-SA 4.0, read 2026-09-30 through the MediaWiki API; for a simplified character whose entry only points to the traditional form, that form's entry) or in its Unihan definition. A character can mean several things and a family chooses a name for many reasons, so the gloss is a guide. The plan named Wikipedia's 'Chinese given name' as the source of about 150 given names; its table lists full names of surname and given name, which this page never prints as pairs, so the official report is used instead and holds 91 given names. x.type is what the Name type row filters on (family, family-50, family-10, girl, boy); x.era is what the birth-decade row filters on and family cards carry none; x.ascii is the pinyin without tone marks. Counted from this file: 191 cards, 100 family names and 91 given names (49 on a girls' list, 43 on a boys' list). Every card that states a meaning, an origin or another form of the name carries the address of the page that statement was read on in x.src (and a second reference in x.src2 where one was used). Licence: Mixed, so no single license covers this list. The family-name table and the character definitions draw on English Wikipedia and English Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Which given names the 2020 report lists is quoted with credit from the Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China; this site grants no license over that part. Readings were checked against the Unicode Han Database, © Unicode, Inc., used under the Unicode license (https://www.unicode.org/license.txt). The pinyin, the glosses, the bands and the decades are our own work.