Chinese boy names
Ask what Wei means and the only honest answer is another question: which Wei? 伟 is great, 威 is power, 卫 is to guard. A Chinese given name is one or two characters, each carrying its own sense, and the romanisation throws away both the characters and the tones. So this page names the character every time — and where a syllable has no settled one, it says so instead of picking for you.
None of these 27 names appears in the SSA 2025 top 100, and no honest page can put a number on them. Several are among the commonest men's names in China; that is a fact about China, not about American birth certificates.
Traditional names
Single characters chosen for the quality they name — the oldest and steadiest way to name a Chinese son. Three of them are shared with Vietnamese and Korean, which read the same character in their own languages.
- MingMINGChinese
Bright, clear, discerning — 明 míng, the sun 日 written beside the moon 月. The same character names the Ming dynasty and the basketball player Yao Ming.
- WeiWAYChinese
The page's headline example. 伟 wěi is great, 威 wēi is might, 卫 wèi is to guard, 维 wéi is to hold together. All four tones are in live use for this one sound.
- JianjyenChinese
Character-dependent: 建 jiàn to build, 健 jiàn vigorous, 剑 jiàn a sword, 坚 jiān firm and solid.
- JunjyoonChinese
Talented, outstanding — 俊 jùn, in classical usage the sort of man a government hoped to recruit. Read 준, it is the commonest ending in Korean boys' names.
- JiejyehChinese
Outstanding, exceptional — 杰 jié, the one who stands above the rest. Rhymes with "yeah", not with "gee".
- QiangCHYAHNGChinese
Strong, powerful, forceful — 强 qiáng, the plain Chinese word for strength used as a name with nothing added.
- YongYOHNGChinese
Brave, courageous — 勇, read yǒng in Chinese and 용 in Korean, where it does the same job.
- AnAHNChinese
Peace, calm, safety — 安 ān, traditionally analysed as a roof 宀 over a woman 女: a household at rest. Vietnamese uses the same character.
- BaoBOW, as in take a bowChinese
Treasure. 寶 stacks a roof over jade, a pot and a cowrie shell — the old money — and simplifies to 宝. Vietnamese Bảo is the same word.
- HuiHWAYChinese
Set by the character: 辉 huī radiance, 慧 huì quick wisdom, 惠 huì kindness. Three unrelated names sharing one spelling.
- KunKWUNChinese
Earth, the receptive — 坤 kūn, the pure-yin trigram of the I Ching and the counterpart of 乾 qián, heaven.
- KwanKWAHNChinese
A spelling, not a word. Kwan is the Hong Kong romanisation of Cantonese 關, surname of the deified general Guan Yu, and of the 觀 in Kwan Yin. Anyone offering one tidy translation has picked a character for you.
One character from the natural world
The other steady tradition: name the boy for something large. These are ordinary Chinese nouns, and their meanings do not shift the way the abstract characters above can.
- HaiHIGHChinese
The sea — 海 hǎi, the water radical 氵 beside 每. In both Chinese and Vietnamese it extends from salt water to sheer quantity.
- ChenchunChinese
Dawn, early morning — 晨 chén, the hour before the sun is properly up. The vowel is that of "sun", not of "ten".
- HaoHOWChinese
Vast: 浩 hào of water without end, 昊 hào of the open sky. It opens more two-character names than almost any other first element.
- TaoTOWChinese
Great waves, breakers, the noise of surf — 涛 tāo. Nothing to do with the 道 of Daoism, which is a different character read the same way.
- LeiLAYChinese
磊 lěi is three stones 石 stacked in a pyramid — open, upright, nothing concealed. 雷 léi is thunder. It rhymes with day.
- PengPUNGChinese
鹏 péng, the vast bird of the Zhuangzi that turns for the southern ocean with wings like clouds across the sky. A name chosen for scale.
- XiangSHYAHNGChinese
To soar, to wheel on held wings — 翔 xiáng, feathers 羽 joined to 羊 for the sound.
- YangYAHNGChinese
阳 yáng, the sunlit side of the hill, hence warmth and the active pole of yin and yang. Or 洋, the open ocean and the wide world.
Two-character compounds
Where Chinese naming gets interesting. Two characters are chosen together, and the pair often forms a real phrase rather than a decorative pile — which is why these read as composed rather than picked from a list.
- HaoranHOW-rahnChinese
浩然 hàorán, vast and unforced. Mencius used the phrase 浩然之气 for the flood-like moral spirit a person can cultivate, and that is the association parents want.
- HaoyuHOW-yooChinese
浩 hào, immense, plus 宇 yǔ, the eaves of a roof and by extension all of space. Vastness twice over.
- Yuxuanyoo-SHWENChinese
宇 yǔ, the whole sweep of space, with 轩 xuān, a carriage with a raised front and so a lofty, dignified bearing.
- Zhihaojih-HOWChinese
志 zhì is where the heart is headed — resolve. 豪 háo is heroic, unrestrained, exceptional. The will fixed on something large.
- Zihaodzuh-HOWChinese
A heroic son: 子 zǐ, a child and in classical use a title of respect, the Master in 孔子 Confucius. Written 梓 instead it is the catalpa tree.
- Junjiejyoon-JYEHChinese
俊杰 jùnjié is a word in its own right — a person of exceptional ability. Talent joined to distinction.
- Jianguojyen-GWAWChinese
建国, build the nation — a standing phrase, not a poetic compound, and a date stamp. Registers filled with Jianguos after October 1949 and the name is close to extinct in births after the mid-1980s.
How Chinese naming works
There is no stock of Chinese given names. European parents pick from an inherited list; Chinese parents compose, choosing one or two characters out of the several thousand in ordinary use, which is why two people sharing a given name is a coincidence of composition rather than a shared tradition. The surname comes first and is nearly always a single syllable — Wang, Li, Zhang, Liu — so a full name is usually three characters and reads as family, then generation, then person. That middle position was once formally spoken for: many lineages kept a genealogy that assigned every man of one generation the same character, so brothers and cousins born decades apart shared a syllable by rule. The practice thinned through the twentieth century and the one-child decades finished most of it, but it is still why the names of older relatives so often rhyme with each other.
The second half of the job is sound. A composed name has to survive being read aloud, so parents test the tones against each other and against the surname, and they check for unfortunate homophones — a real constraint in a language this full of them. Historically the pressure ran the other way too: under the naming taboo, characters used in an emperor's or a father's personal name were off limits to everyone below, and scribes substituted or deliberately miswrote them. What all of this means for an English-language name list is simple, and worth saying once: pinyin is a transcription of sound only. Strip the characters and the tone marks and Wei or Hui stops being a word at all. Set beside the Japanese and Korean systems on the origins index, Chinese is the source both of them borrowed from — and the only one of the three where the characters are still the everyday script.