Chinese name

Chinese names are 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 Japanese name, a Korean 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 family name (姓氏; xìngshì) followed by an individual name (名; míng), which may be either one or two characters in length. In recent decades, two-character individual 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 individual names, with the remainder almost exclusively having one character.

Prior to the 21st century, most educated Chinese men also used a courtesy name ("style name"; 字; zì) 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 individual name (without being disrespectful), the use of which 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.