Chinese name

Chinese names are personal names used by individuals from Greater China and other parts of the Sinophone world. Sometimes the same set of Chinese characters could be chosen as a Chinese name, a Hong Kong name, a Japanese name, a Korean name, a Han Taiwanese name, a Malaysian Chinese name, or a Vietnamese name, but they would be spelled differently due to their varying historical pronunciation of Chinese characters.

Modern Chinese names generally have a one-character surname (姓氏; xìngshì) that comes first, followed by a given name (名; míng) which may be either one or two characters in length. In recent decades, two-character given names are much more commonly chosen; studies during the 2000s and 2010s estimated that over three-quarters of China's population at the time had two-character given names, with the remainder almost exclusively having one character.

Prior to the 21st century, most educated Chinese men also used a courtesy name (or "style name"; 字) by which they were known among those outside their family and closest friends. Respected artists or poets will sometimes also use a professional art name (号; 號; hào) among their social peers.

From at least the time of the Shang dynasty, the Chinese observed a number of naming taboos regulating who may or may not use a person's given name (without being disrespectful). In general, using the given name connoted the speaker's authority and superior position to the addressee. Peers and younger relatives were barred from speaking it. Owing to this, many historical Chinese figures—particularly emperors—used a half-dozen or more different names in different contexts and for different speakers. Those possessing names (sometimes even mere homophones) identical to the emperor's were frequently forced to change them. The normalization of personal names after the May Fourth Movement has generally eradicated aliases such as the school name and courtesy name but traces of the old taboos remain, particularly within families.

Although some terms from the ancient Chinese naming system, such as xìng (姓) and míng (名), are still used today, it used to be much more complex.

In the first half of the 1st millennium BC, during the Zhou dynasty, members of the Chinese nobility could possess up to four different names—personal names (míng 名), clan names (xìng 姓), lineage names (shì 氏), and "style" or "courtesy" names (zì 字)— as well as up to two titles: standard titles (jué 爵), and posthumous titles (shì 諡; 谥 or shìhào 諡號; 谥号).

Commoners possessed only a personal name (ming), and the modern concept of a "surname" or "family name" did not yet exist at any level of society. The old lineage (shi) and clan names (xing) began to become "family names" in the modern sense and trickle down to commoners around 500 BC, during the late Spring and Autumn period, but the process took several centuries to complete, and it was not until the late Han dynasty (1st and 2nd centuries AD) that all Chinese commoners had surnames.

Although there are currently over 6,000 Chinese surnames including non-Han Chinese surnames (姓; xìng) in use in China, the colloquial expression for the "Chinese people" is Bǎixìng (百姓) "Hundred Surnames", and a mere hundred surnames still make up over 85% of China's 1.3 billion citizens. In fact, just the top three—Wang (王), Li (李), and Zhang (張; 张)—cover more than 20% of the population. This homogeneity results from the great majority of Han family names having only one character, while the small number of compound surnames is mostly restricted to minority groups. The most common compound surname still in use in ethnic Han families is Ouyang.