Common Chinese Names

Published: 2000-03-21

Updated: 2012-08-06

Copyright © 2000-2012 Chih-Hao Tsai (Email: )

Introduction

Chinese names are interesting in that there are virtually infinite given names and a relatively small set of family names. Since the family names can more or less be though as finite, you can find lists of Chinese family names in many places. However, relatively speaking, we know much less about the distribution of Chinese given names. Are there also common given names, like "Mary", "James", or "John" in English? (See Frequently Occurring First Names and Surnames From the 1990 Census by U.S. Census Bureau for frequency counts of American English names.)

I carried out some rudimentary statistics on the Chinese name tokens available at http://www.csie.nctu.edu.tw/service/jcee/ website. Please refer to the List of Chinese Names website for the nature of the source of these name tokens.

Frequency Counts for Family and Given Names

Because there is no space boundary between the family name and given name, the family and given names were determined using the following algorithm.

1. If a name had two or three characters, the first character was the family name and the rest was the given name.
2. If a name had more than three characters, the first two characters were the family name and the rest was the given name.

Frequency counts were performed on the 19 annual lists (1994-2012) instead of on the merged list. The annual lists were not available for download at the List of Chinese Names website (which only lists unique names), but can be found at http://www.csie.nctu.edu.tw/service/jcee/.

Common Names

25 most common family names by year

25 most common given names by year

25 most common characters used in given names by year