Chinese Baby Names

Chinese baby names carry the sound, history and meaning of the Chinese naming tradition. Our collection holds 2448 Chinese names, 1216 for boys and 1224 for girls, each with its own meaning, origin notes, popularity and numerology. Browse the names below and follow any one for its full profile.

Whether you are drawn to Chinese names for heritage, for their sound, or simply for a meaning that resonates, this page is a living list that grows as we research and add more. Names are shown with the most prominent first.

How Chinese names are chosen

A Chinese given name is not picked from a list — the parents choose one or two characters out of the whole writing system, which makes almost every name a deliberate, individual composition rather than an inherited label. Many families also carry a generation name, zibei, in which every sibling and paternal cousin of the same generation shares one character; the sequence is often fixed in advance as a generation poem, each descendant taking the next character in the verse. The practice traces to the Tang and Song dynasties and is set by clan elders. Some families additionally check a candidate name against the child's Ba Zi, the eight birth characters, to see which of the five elements the name should supply.

Because the characters carry the meaning and the sound is secondary, two people whose names romanise identically in pinyin may have been given quite different names.

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