Someone gave you a Chinese name. Here is what it actually says.

Chinese Name Checker

Paste the characters and get the reading, the meaning and the stroke count for each one, whether it begins with one of the commonest surnames, what the name sounds like said out loud — and what those characters do not mean, which is the part the tattoo sites get wrong. 9 checks, every one of them a lookup. Nothing is stored.

How names work Need a name?
Characters only — 王小明, not Wang Xiaoming. Up to 12 characters. Only romanisation? The pinyin checker takes that instead.
Or try:
Name Inspector — you be the checker Four levels · three lives · no clock · endless

A name comes in; say what the checker would flag about it. The names are assembled for inspection from real surnames and real dictionary characters — nobody is called these, and an item with nothing wrong with it is not the same as a good name. 223 names, and every answer is produced by running the checks above.

The 9 checks, and where each answer comes from

Every line of a report is a lookup against data this site already publishes, which is the only reason a page like this is worth reading. None of it is an opinion and none of it was written for your name in particular.

  1. Is it the shape of a name? Two to four characters, all Chinese. Longer usually means a transliterated foreign name or a phrase.
  2. Does the dictionary hold every character? Answered by the same dictionary behind the site's translators, so this page cannot disagree with them. A character it does not hold is reported as exactly that, never guessed at.
  3. Does it begin with a common surname? Checked against the 100 commonest surnames and the 6 two-character ones, the same list the surnames article publishes. A miss means only “not in this list,” never “not a surname.”
  4. Is the given name itself an ordinary word? A two-character given name that is also a headword reads the way "Mr Tuesday Sandwich" does.
  5. Does it sound like something else? Every headword with the identical reading, tones included — searched over all 4995 of them.
  6. How much writing is it? Stroke counts from the same open character data that drives the stroke-order animations elsewhere on the site.
  7. Do the tones collide? Two third tones in a row are not said the way they are written. Tone sandhi explains why.
  8. Can a character be read more than one way? If so the characters alone do not say which reading the name uses, and somebody has to tell you.
  9. Is a character one English sources describe wrongly? 25 characters have a page of their own here because the usual English gloss is wrong, and a name is one of the two places that gloss does real damage. The correction shown is that page's own wording.

Readings and meanings come from ThePureLanguage's own dictionary first and CC-CEDICT second; anything marked † is CC-CEDICT's, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Stroke data is from the Make Me a Hanzi dataset. All of it is named on the licences page.

Why this checks a name instead of making one

There is no shortage of things that will hand you a Chinese name — generators, apps, and any chat assistant you ask. What almost none of them will do is look at the name you were already given, by a teacher, a colleague or a friend of the family, and tell you what is actually in it. That is the harder question and it is the one people have.

It is also the one that can be answered honestly here. Turning "Michael" into Chinese means picking characters that approximate the sound, and the table of which characters are conventionally used for that is not this site's dictionary and not the openly licensed dictionary it supplements it with — so inventing one would mean publishing Chinese this site cannot stand behind. Checking a name needs nothing but the dictionary, the surname list and the character data, all of which are already here and already used by every other page.

If you do need a name produced, the site has a generator — and this page will then tell you what it handed you. Reading how a good Chinese name is chosen first is worth twenty minutes, because most of what makes a name good is not something any tool measures.

Questions people ask about Chinese names

Start with the things that are checkable, because they are the ones that actually go wrong. Does it begin with one of the 100 commonest surnames or one of the 6 compound ones? Does the dictionary hold every character, and is the reading the one you were told? Is the given name accidentally an ordinary word, or pronounced exactly like one? How many strokes is it to write? This page answers all of those. What it cannot answer is whether the name sounds dated, whether it reads as a man's or a woman's name, or what a native speaker's first reaction would be — those are judgements about fashion and register that no dictionary holds, and any tool claiming to score them is guessing.

Surname first, always. 王小明 is Mr Wang, and 小明 is the given name. This is the opposite of the English order and it is the mistake this checker sees most: a name made by transliterating an English first name and then putting a surname after it reads to a Chinese speaker as a name printed backwards. Almost all Chinese surnames are one character; six common ones — 欧阳, 司马, 上官, 诸葛, 东方 and 慕容 — are two.

No, and that is deliberate — see the section above. It checks a name you already have, against data this site owns. If you want one generated, the name generator does that, and you can bring the result straight back here.

Mandarin has far fewer distinct syllables than English, so sharing a sound is completely normal and is not by itself a problem — 李 the surname and 里 meaning "inside" are said identically by tens of millions of people every day. It becomes worth knowing when a whole given name lands exactly on a common word, tones included, because that is the version people hear. The page lists what matches and leaves the judgement to you, since whether it matters depends entirely on what the other word means.

Because two third tones never survive next to each other in Mandarin: the first is said as a second tone. It happens to 你好, written nǐ hǎo and said ní hǎo, and to any name of the same shape. Nothing is wrong with such a name, but anyone reading it off the pinyin will say it incorrectly unless told — exactly the sort of thing nobody thinks to mention. Tone sandhi covers the rest of the rules.

Completely free, no account, no limit. The name you paste is checked and shown back to you and is not stored, not written to any record of what was checked, and never placed in the address bar — which is why the form submits rather than putting the name in a link. No analytics event carries it.

Where to go next

Get Your Own Chinese Name Print Your Name in 田字格, Stroke by Stroke How Chinese Names Work Look Up Any Chinese Character Chinese Symbols and What They Really Mean How to Say a Chinese Name