Names of China CN

Surnames in China are inherited, but drawn from a stock small enough that a few cover much of the population; the names that most distinguish China from the rest of the world are 张, 李 and 陈.

Written in Chinese, Uyghur, bo, Mongolian and 1 more.

Population
1.4B
Official registers
4
Name forms recorded
80K
BBuilt from 4 official registers, 79,869 name forms in our corpus, 20 cited works.

At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.

The account of the naming system rests on encyclopaedia and genealogy sources; it has not yet been checked against onomastic literature.

fewerlarger share
Where the names most characteristic of China are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, China included.

How names work in China

6 naming traditions are in use in China, listed in the order of the country's languages. They are separate systems, not variants of one, and each has its own page.

The most common names in China

Characteristic of China

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when China holds a larger share of its bearers than the world does, weighted by how much of the country's whole name distribution it accounts for.

汉伟丽杰静敏涛军艳文华勇超鹏鑫宇婷磊强燕红平芳佳明浩娟俊丹辉玲建波晓海斌雪飞慧霞凯玉洋云娜英倩颖洁旭亮萍峰瑞梅健莉欣春琳
Sized by how much of the difference between China's name distribution and the world's this name accounts for. Hover for its share here against its share worldwide.(measured from records)

Over time

秀英丽静艳敏195520052,213,154
ChineseNames: given names by birth decade/cohort 1930-2008, 1955–2005 (6 years). The line is that register's own figure for each year — not a total across registers, which would count the same people twice. The publisher labels this series “cohort”.

Up to five names at a time.

Scripts & spelling

Names in China are written in Han (99%) and Latin (1%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.

李surname(measured from records)
张surname(measured from records)
陈surname(measured from records)
徐surname(measured from records)
汉given name(measured from records)
The best-attested names in China, in the spelling our records use there. Where a Latin spelling is also attested it is shown beneath — a spelling from the corpus, not a machine romanisation.

Countries whose names look alike

Measured as the overlap between each country's top 300 given-name forms, weighted by how common each is — the fuzzy-set approach of Lauc (2024), on a truncated inventory.

Registers & sources

Official registers

Cited works

Behind this page's own account — its one-line answer, its explanation of why the rankings differ, and the notes on its registers. Each naming tradition cites its own sources on its page. Not yet checked against onomastic literature.

About this data

Official figures are reproduced from the register named beside them, at the year named beside them, and are never combined across registers. The "across all records" ranking counts records in our own corpus — historical registers, the diaspora, business and place records — and is not a population count. Bearer estimates are omitted where a name accounts for more than a quarter of a country's records, because the estimate is not defensible there. Names listed by reference works and licensed name dictionaries are cited as attesting a name; their figures are not published.

Data snapshot: 2026-10-09.

Questions

Is there one naming system in China?
No — 6 are described on this page (Chinese, Cantonese and Hong Kong, Hokkien and Min, Wu and Shanghainese, Zhuang, Uyghur), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of China”, https://mondonomo.ai/names/CN (data snapshot 2026-10-09).