[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":251},["ShallowReactive",2],{"article:name-sound-and-meaning:en":3,"article-topic:name-analysis:en":153,"related-articles:en:name-analysis:name-sound-and-meaning:bazi-name-selection":228},{"slug":4,"title":5,"description":6,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":9,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":11,"updatedAt":12,"noindex":13,"summary":14,"sections":15,"references":120,"relatedTools":133,"seo":135,"contentImage":139},"name-sound-and-meaning","Chinese Name Sound and Meaning: Cost, Tone, and Stroke Counts","The oldest text on naming argues from cost, not luck: a name is a word the system must retire. Then tone sandhi, syllable seams, and stroke counts that move with the script.","Name Analysis","name-analysis","","chen-jun","2026-10-26","2026-10-30",false,"Shen Xu's six avoidances all follow one rule — do not retire a word the rites still need. The modern five-grid method turns the name into an integer instead, and 张伟 scores 金火金 in simplified strokes but 木木木 in traditional, because four of the five grids move.",[16,22,57,62,92,98,104,110],{"heading":17,"body":18},"The oldest text on naming is an argument about cost",[19,20,21],"The earliest systematic statement on Chinese naming that survives is a short answer in the Zuo Tradition. Duke Huan of Lu asks Shen Xu what to name his newborn son, and Shen Xu answers that names come in five kinds: from the circumstance of the birth (信), from a virtue (义), from a resemblance (象), from an object (假), and from the father (类).","He then lists six things a name is not taken from — a state, an office, a mountain or river, a hidden illness, a domestic animal, a ritual vessel — and the reason he gives is not about fortune. It is about what happens to the word afterwards. The Zhou used tabooing in the service of the spirits, and every name will eventually be tabooed, so a name taken from a state retires the state's name, one taken from an office retires the office, one taken from a mountain retires the mountain.","That is the whole argument, and it is a cost argument. A name is a word you hand into a system that is obliged to stop using it. Choose one whose retirement costs nothing. What is absent from the passage is equally telling: no stroke count, no five-phase fit, no score, and no claim that the name will make the child anything.",{"heading":23,"body":24,"table":27},"The six avoidances are one rule with six worked cases",[25,26],"Read as a list of superstitions the six look arbitrary. Read as cost accounting they are consistent: each one names something the ritual system has to keep saying, and each one retires it.","The last entry is the exception, and it is the interesting one. A hidden illness is not something the system needs to keep saying, so the cost argument does not reach it. The author gave no reason because he thought none was needed: a name should not remind its bearer of a defect every time it is used.",{"headers":28,"rows":32},[29,30,31],"Not taken from","What is retired","Why the cost is high",[33,37,41,45,49,53],[34,35,36],"A state","The state's name","A whole polity has to be referred to obliquely",[38,39,40],"An office","The office","Jin retired 司徒 and Song retired 司空 after rulers took those names",[42,43,44],"A mountain or river","The presiding name","The place's rites have to be conducted around the word",[46,47,48],"A domestic animal","The sacrifice","The offering is organised by the animal's name",[50,51,52],"A ritual vessel","The rite","The vessel's name is part of the ceremony",[54,55,56],"A hidden illness","Nothing — no reason given","The cost is to the bearer, not to the system",{"heading":58,"body":59},"The modern method does something different with the same word",[60,61],"The scheme that dominates naming advice now is built on stroke counts. Five grids are derived from them: 天格 from the surname plus one, 人格 from the surname and the first given character, 地格 from the given name plus one, 总格 from every stroke in the name, and 外格 from the difference. The last digit of the first three is then mapped onto a phase — one and two to wood, three and four to fire, five and six to earth, seven and eight to metal, nine and zero to water — and that triple is read as the name's 三才.","This is a real change of subject, and it is worth being precise about what kind. The word stops being a word. It becomes an integer, and the integer is what gets judged. That has one genuine advantage over the classical passage: arithmetic can be checked by anyone, and the classical passage cannot. It also has one genuine weakness, and the weakness is fatal to the method's claim to be about a particular name rather than about a script.",{"heading":63,"body":64,"table":68},"The number is not stable, because the strokes are not",[65,66,67],"Take a two-character name, 张伟. Counted in the simplified forms the surname is 7 strokes and the given name 6; counted in the traditional forms they are 11 and 11. Run both through the same formulas.","Four of the five grids move. The 三才 follows: 8, 13 and 7 give 金, 火 and 金, while 12, 22 and 12 give 木, 木 and 木. One of those triples is a clash — fire over metal — and the other is like with like, which the same tables rate as harmonious. So the identical person, with the identical name, is given opposite readings depending on which writing system the practitioner counted in.","Nothing in the method says which form to count. That is not a gap in the instructions; it is the method describing a property of the script and calling it a property of the person. A name cannot be good in one writing system and bad in another, because the name is the same name.",{"headers":69,"rows":73},[70,71,72],"Grid","张伟 (simplified)","張偉 (traditional)",[74,78,82,85,89],[75,76,77],"天格","7 + 1 = 8 → 金","11 + 1 = 12 → 木",[79,80,81],"人格","7 + 6 = 13 → 火","11 + 11 = 22 → 木",[83,84,77],"地格","6 + 1 = 7 → 金",[86,87,88],"总格","13","22",[90,91,91],"外格","2",{"heading":93,"body":94},"Tone: what the name sounds like when it is not read one character at a time",[95,96,97],"A name is spoken in connected speech, and connected speech in Mandarin changes tones at the seams. The rule that catches names most often is the third-tone pair: when two third tones meet, the first is pronounced as a second. A third tone followed by any other tone loses its rise and is realised as the fall alone, a half third.","So a name chosen for the softness of three dipping tones does not sound like three dipping tones. 李小雨 is written 3-3-3. Spoken, it is 2-2-3: 李 rises, 小 rises, 雨 is the only one that dips. A parent who picked three third tones for a gentle, low sound has chosen a name that opens with two rising tones and ends on a fall — which is a perfectly good shape, but not the one they thought they were choosing.","The check takes ten seconds and is worth doing before anything else: say the full name, surname included, at conversational speed, and listen for where the tones actually land rather than where the dictionary puts them.",{"heading":99,"body":100},"The seam between the syllables, and why the spelling has to carry it",[101,102,103],"Mandarin has about 1,300 tone-bearing syllables and about 400 without tone. General use runs to roughly 3,500 characters. Divide and the density falls out: about three characters share each tone-bearing syllable, and about nine share each toneless one. Homophony is not an occasional hazard in this language; it is the default, and the written form is what separates the cases.","That is why the seam between two syllables matters so much in a romanised name. When the second syllable has no initial consonant, it fuses with the final of the first, and the apostrophe exists precisely to stop it: 西安 is Xī'ān, and written without the mark it becomes 先. The same thing happens to names. 张安 written properly is Zhang'an; written Zhangan, as forms and databases routinely render it, it reads back as 张干.","A name therefore has to survive two reductions at once — the loss of tone marks, and the loss of the apostrophe — because systems do both. The test is to write the pinyin the way a database would store it, all lowercase, no marks, no punctuation, and read it back as a stranger would.",{"heading":105,"body":106},"Meaning: what the oldest dictionary actually gives you",[107,108,109],"An entry in the Shuowen Jiezi has three parts: a gloss, a component analysis, and a pronunciation note. All three are worth reading, and the middle one is the one people skip.","The character usually offered as the easy example is 明, explained as sun and moon together. The Shuowen does not say that. Its entry is 朙, glossed 照也, and analysed as 从月从囧 — moon and a window, not moon and sun. The 日-plus-月 form is later, and the sun-and-moon reading is a much later folk analysis that happens to be more memorable than the original. Both readings are now in circulation, which is exactly the situation a name has to be chosen inside.","The practical instruction that follows is unglamorous. Read the full gloss, not the first line of it; a character whose primary sense is attractive can carry a secondary sense the dictionary also lists. Read the component analysis and notice when it disagrees with the story you were told. And read the character in both scripts, because the name will be written in whichever one the household and the register actually use.",{"heading":111,"body":112,"bullets":113},"The order to check in","Each step can eliminate a candidate outright, so run them in this order and stop when one fails:",[114,115,116,117,118,119],"Say the whole name aloud at conversational speed, several times, and listen for the tone sandhi rather than the dictionary tones.","Write the pinyin the way a database would store it — lowercase, no tone marks, no apostrophe — and read it back cold.","Write the name in both scripts, count the strokes in each, and notice whether the two counts would give the same reading. If they would not, the number is not about the name.","Read the full gloss and the component analysis of every character, and check the secondary senses.","Check the local dialect if the household speaks one, since the name will be heard in it at home and in Mandarin everywhere else.","Only then compare whatever is left on element or number, if that matters to you. It is the last filter, and it is the only one that cannot be checked.",[121,128],{"id":122,"kind":123,"title":124,"detail":125,"publisher":126,"url":127,"accessedAt":11},"zuoZhuanNaming","traditional","Zuo Tradition, Duke Huan year 6 (左傳·桓公六年)","The passage where Shen Xu lists five kinds of name — from the circumstance of birth, from a virtue, from a resemblance, from an object, from the father — and six things a name is not taken from. Cited for that list; it says nothing about stroke counts or five-phase fit.","Wikisource digital text","https:\u002F\u002Fzh.wikisource.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E6%98%A5%E7%A7%8B%E5%B7%A6%E6%B0%8F%E5%82%B3\u002F%E6%A1%93%E5%85%AC",{"id":129,"kind":123,"title":130,"detail":131,"publisher":126,"url":132,"accessedAt":11},"shuowenJiezi","Shuowen Jiezi (說文解字)","The Eastern Han dictionary that organises characters by shared form component and glosses each one with its component analysis and a fanqie pronunciation. Cited for the structure of a character entry; it is a philological work, not a naming manual.","https:\u002F\u002Fzh.wikisource.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E8%AA%AA%E6%96%87%E8%A7%A3%E5%AD%97",[134],"bazi-name-selection",{"title":5,"description":136,"path":137,"type":138},"Read the classical statement of what a name is for, then check the spoken form, the syllable seam, and whether the stroke count survives a change of script.","\u002Farticles\u002Fname-sound-and-meaning","article",{"src":140,"srcByLocale":141,"alt":143,"width":144,"height":145,"altByLocale":146,"captionByLocale":149},"\u002Fimg\u002Farticles\u002Fname-sound-and-meaning.svg",{"tw":142},"\u002Fimg\u002Farticles\u002Fname-sound-and-meaning-tw.svg","Five stacked rows listing the five kinds of name in the Zuo Tradition passage: from the circumstance of birth, from a virtue, from a resemblance, from an object, and from the father.",1280,960,{"zh":147,"tw":148},"五行并列的取名来源清单：信、义、象、假、类，出自《左传·桓公六年》申繻答桓公问名。","五行併列的取名來源清單：信、義、象、假、類，出自《左傳·桓公六年》申繻答桓公問名。",{"en":150,"zh":151,"tw":152},"The five kinds of name come from the Zuo Tradition, Duke Huan year 6. The same passage then names six things a name is not taken from — a state, an office, a mountain or river, a hidden illness, a domestic animal, a ritual vessel — because names were tabooed.","五种取名来源出自《左传·桓公六年》。同一段还列出六项不可取以为名之物——国、官、山川、隐疾、牲畜、器币——理由是名终将避讳。","五種取名來源出自《左傳·桓公六年》。同一段還列出六項不可取以為名之物——國、官、山川、隱疾、牲畜、器幣——理由是名終將避諱。",{"topic":154,"articles":184,"tools":221},{"slug":8,"title":7,"eyebrow":155,"description":156,"relatedTools":157,"articleIdeas":158,"seo":164,"sections":168},"Naming and five elements","How a Chinese name is actually chosen: what survives from the classical statement of naming, what stroke counting computes, what a five-elements selection can and cannot decide, and the order the four should be applied in.",[134],[159,160,161,162,163],"Name Sound and Meaning","Five Elements Name Selection","Business Name Selection","Chinese Name Stroke Analysis","Naming Avoidances in the Classical Texts",{"title":165,"description":166,"path":167},"Chinese Name Analysis Guide","Learn how Chinese names are chosen: the classical statement of naming, stroke counting, five-elements selection, and the order to apply them in.","\u002Ftopics\u002Fname-analysis",[169,172,175,178,181],{"heading":170,"body":171},"A naming decision is made on sound and meaning, then checked against tradition","The earliest systematic statement of Chinese naming that survives is a short answer in the Zuo Tradition. Asked what to name his newborn son, Shen Xu answers that names come in five kinds — from the circumstance of the birth, from a virtue, from a resemblance, from an object, from the father — and then lists six things a name is not taken from: a state, an office, a mountain or river, a hidden illness, a domestic animal, a ritual vessel. His reason is practical rather than mystical. The Zhou used tabooing in the service of the spirits, and a name will be tabooed in the end, so a name whose avoidance costs nothing is the one to choose. What is absent from that whole passage is every numerological device that later got attached to naming. No stroke count, no five-phase fit, no score. The classical statement is about meaning, reference, and the consequences of the word itself — which is also where the decision is still made today.",{"heading":173,"body":174},"Four traditions get applied to the same name, and they do not convert","Most naming advice blends four separate traditions without saying so, and each answers a different question. Sound and meaning answer what the name says and how it carries. Stroke counting answers how many marks each character takes. Five-elements selection answers which phase the chart is short of. Written form answers how the name survives being written and typed for a lifetime. They are not translations of one another: a name can be excellent on meaning and unremarkable on stroke count, and the reverse is just as common. The practical consequence is that no single ranking of names exists, and any tool that returns one has silently picked weights for you. Keeping the four apart is most of the work of choosing a name well.",{"heading":176,"body":177},"Stroke counting: five sums over the same characters","The stroke-count method — Wu Ge, the five grids — takes a written name, counts the strokes in each character, and reads the five resulting numbers through a traditional table of favourable and unfavourable values. The system was built in Japan in the early twentieth century and adopted into Chinese naming practice afterwards, which is why its stroke standard is the Kangxi dictionary rather than the forms people write today. Every grid is a different sum over the same two or three characters, and the numbers move depending on four decisions that are conventions rather than measurements: traditional characters rather than simplified, radicals counted as the characters they came from, and the luck tables themselves. Where two calculators disagree about a name, the disagreement is the finding.",{"heading":179,"body":180},"Five elements: the step that carries the weight is the one that is argued about","A five-elements selection starts from a birth chart and ends at a shortlist of characters. In between it fixes the birth data, lays out the four pillars, names the Day Master, and judges which element the chart is short of. The first three of those are reproducible arithmetic. The fourth is a judgement about the whole chart — how much support the Day Master has, whether the season is on its side, what the month branch contributes — and it is exactly there that two schools read the same chart and name opposite useful elements. The classical statement of the five phases gives each phase a behaviour — water soaks and descends, fire flames and rises, wood bends and straightens, metal yields and changes, earth accepts and grows — and contains no industry classification at all.",{"heading":182,"body":183},"The order to apply them in","Meaning and sound come first, because they are what a person hears inside their own name and what the family can check by saying it out loud. Written form comes next, because a name filled into a form several thousand times is worth choosing partly for how long it takes to write. Stroke counting and five-elements fit come after, and only as tiebreakers between names that already work. For a business name the order shifts once more: trademark, domain, sayability and signage all come before any element reading, and a name that fails one of those fails regardless of its phase. None of the four traditions reaches a person's health, schooling, work or relationships, and none of them needs correcting by swapping out a character the family already loves.",[185,198,208,211],{"slug":186,"title":187,"description":188,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":189,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":190,"updatedAt":191,"summary":192,"relatedTools":193,"seo":195},"chinese-name-stroke-analysis","Chinese Name Stroke Analysis: The Five Grids, Counted","How the five grids are actually counted, including the four cases for the outer grid, why 強 and 强 give different charts, and what the eighty-one labels cannot settle.","\u002Fpages\u002Farticles\u002Fxingming-bihua-jixiong.html","2025-09-17","2026-10-28","The arithmetic is reproducible and the labels are not. One character written two ways moves the earth, outer and total grids; a name that reads as uniformly favourable often is not.",[134,194],"wu-ge-name-analysis",{"title":187,"description":196,"path":197,"type":138},"Five grids, four cases for the outer grid, Kangxi strokes rather than simplified forms — and why the eighty-one labels are a table, not a measurement.","\u002Farticles\u002Fchinese-name-stroke-analysis",{"slug":199,"title":200,"description":201,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":9,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":11,"updatedAt":11,"summary":202,"relatedTools":203,"seo":204},"five-elements-name-selection","Five Elements Name Selection: How the Method Actually Works","See what a five-elements name selection computes, where the Day Master strength judgement carries the weight, and why two schools can name opposite useful elements from the same chart.","A five-elements selection does four reproducible steps and then hands you a shortlist. The Day Master strength judgement is the step that carries the weight, and two schools can read the same chart and name opposite elements.",[134],{"title":205,"description":206,"path":207,"type":138},"Five Elements Name Selection: How the Method Works","Learn what a five-elements name selection computes, how Day Master strength is judged, and why sound and meaning decide the shortlist.","\u002Farticles\u002Ffive-elements-name-selection",{"slug":4,"title":5,"description":6,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":9,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":11,"updatedAt":12,"summary":14,"relatedTools":209,"seo":210},[134],{"title":5,"description":136,"path":137,"type":138},{"slug":212,"title":213,"description":214,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":9,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":11,"updatedAt":12,"summary":215,"relatedTools":216,"seo":217},"business-name-selection","Business Name Selection: The Register, the Sign, and the Fragment","A business name must be distinctive at the register and easy on a sign, and the two pull against each other. Article 11 refuses descriptive marks; a sign reads at about 1:120.","Trademark classification runs to 45 classes, and Article 11 refuses signs that merely describe the goods — so the name that tells a customer most directly what you sell is the one most likely to be refused. Signage follows a ratio of about one unit of character height per 120 of viewing distance.",[134],{"title":218,"description":219,"path":220,"type":138},"Business Name Selection: Register, Sign, Fragment","Name a shop with the checks that can eliminate a candidate: distinctiveness at the register, legibility on a sign, and the fragment customers will shorten it to.","\u002Farticles\u002Fbusiness-name-selection",[222],{"slug":134,"title":223,"shortTitle":224,"description":225,"category":226,"status":227},"BaZi Name Selection Tool","Name Selection","Compare Chinese candidate names using declared stroke, pronunciation, meaning, and traditional element conventions as a cultural worksheet.","Naming","live",{"articles":229},[230,233,248],{"slug":186,"title":187,"description":188,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":189,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":190,"updatedAt":191,"summary":192,"relatedTools":231,"seo":232},[134,194],{"title":187,"description":196,"path":197,"type":138},{"slug":234,"title":235,"description":236,"category":237,"topicSlug":238,"legacyPath":239,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":240,"updatedAt":241,"summary":242,"relatedTools":243,"seo":245},"favorable-unfavorable-elements","Favorable and Unfavorable Elements in BaZi","A comprehensive guide to identifying favorable (Yong Shen) and unfavorable elements in BaZi — the key to accurate chart interpretation and practical life guidance.","BaZi","bazi-advanced","\u002Fpages\u002Farticles\u002Fbazi-yongshen-jishen.html","2025-12-18","2026-10-14","Knowing your favorable and unfavorable elements is the foundation of practical BaZi application. It guides career choices, color preferences, and timing decisions.",[244,134],"bazi-four-pillars",{"title":235,"description":246,"path":247},"Learn to identify favorable and unfavorable elements in BaZi for accurate chart interpretation and practical life guidance.","\u002Farticles\u002Ffavorable-unfavorable-elements",{"slug":199,"title":200,"description":201,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":9,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":11,"updatedAt":11,"summary":202,"relatedTools":249,"seo":250},[134],{"title":205,"description":206,"path":207,"type":138},1793614153114]