Vietnamese boy names
Nearly every name here is Sino-Vietnamese: a Chinese character that Vietnamese has read in its own voice for a thousand years. Đức is 德, virtue. Phúc is 福, blessing. Sơn is 山, mountain. Name the character and the meaning stops being guesswork, so every one of these 28 entries carries one. And note the first correction: the Nguyên on this page is a given name, 元, the first — not the surname Nguyễn 阮 that an English reader will assume.
Tone marks are part of the spelling, not decoration, so the display forms below carry them; the web addresses strip them, exactly as a passport does. None of these names is in the SSA 2025 top 100, and several are as ordinary in Vietnam as Michael is in Ohio.
Traditional names
The Confucian virtue characters, and still the backbone of Vietnamese naming for sons. Each one is a word an ordinary Vietnamese speaker uses every day, which is why these names are transparent in a way that the same characters no longer are in Japan or Korea.
- ĐứcDUHKVietnamese
Virtue, moral standing, the good in a person's conduct — 德. The Đ with the bar is a hard English d; a plain Vietnamese d is a z or a y.
- HiếuHYEWVietnamese
Filial piety — 孝, an elder written over a child. It covers both the care a son owes living parents and the reverence owed to them afterwards.
- TrungCHOONGVietnamese
Loyalty, faithfulness — 忠, which is 中 “centre” written above 心 “heart”: a heart held steady in the middle.
- DũngZOONGVietnamese
Bravery, courage, nerve — 勇. ZOONG in the north, YOONG in the south, on the creaky ngã tone.
- CườngKUH-ungVietnamese
Strong, forceful, powerful — 強, run together as one beat on a low falling tone.
- HùngHOONGVietnamese
Valiant, manly, imposing — 雄, a graph that named the male of a bird species before it widened to the heroic. The legendary Hùng kings are Vietnam's founding dynasty.
- MinhMINGVietnamese
Bright, clear, quick-minded — 明, the sun beside the moon. The same character as Chinese Ming, read the Vietnamese way.
- TuấnTWUHNVietnamese
Talented, eminent, handsome in the sense of finely made — 俊, the character that also ends a great many Korean names.
- TríCHEEVietnamese
Wisdom, intellect, good judgement — 智, built from 知 “to know” over 日 “sun, day”: knowing that has had time to settle.
- ThànhTAHNVietnamese
To accomplish, to complete, to become — 成, live in everyday speech as thành công, success, and trưởng thành, to grow up.
- DuyZWEEVietnamese
To bind, to hold together, to keep going — 維, the silk-thread radical: originally the cord that ties a thing fast.
- AnAHNVietnamese
Peace, calm, safety — 安, a roof over a household at rest. Shared with Chinese, which reads the same character ān.
The land, the sea and the sky
The other half of the Sino-Vietnamese stock is concrete: characters for things you can point at. They travel better than the virtue names, because a mountain needs no translation.
- HảiHIGHVietnamese
The sea — 海. Vietnam has better than three thousand kilometres of coast, and the character runs through its place names accordingly.
- SơnSUHNVietnamese
Mountain — 山, a pictograph of three peaks drawn that way since the oracle bones. The vowel is ơ, unrounded and central.
- PhongFAWNGVietnamese
Wind — 風, and by extension air, manner and bearing. No tone mark, so the display form and the web address are the same.
- NamNAHMVietnamese
South — 南. It is also the second half of the country's own name: Việt Nam, the Việt of the south.
- TùngTOONGVietnamese
The pine — 松. It holds its needles through winter, which makes it the standing East Asian emblem of constancy.
- HoàngHWAHNGVietnamese
Yellow — 黃. Under the Sinitic court system yellow was reserved to the emperor and forbidden to everyone else, so the word carries rank as well as colour.
- ThiênTYENVietnamese
Heaven, the sky, and by extension what heaven decides — 天, a drawing of a person with the space above the head marked in. Said as one glide, not tee-EN.
Light, luck and lineage
Names given for what a family wants the child's life to look like, plus the two that name the country itself. This is where the Nguyên correction lives.
- QuangKWAHNGVietnamese
Light, a ray, brightness, and from there glory — 光. The qu- is a straightforward kw.
- HuyHWEEVietnamese
Radiance, brilliance, the shine a thing gives off — 輝, written with 光 “light” beside 軍.
- AnhANVietnamese
Outstanding, brilliant, the pick of a group — 英, which first named the flower of a plant and widened to the finest example of anything.
- PhúcFOOKVietnamese
Blessing, good fortune — 福, the happiness that is bestowed rather than seized. This is the character households across East Asia paste on the door at New Year.
- KhánhKAHNVietnamese
Celebration, congratulation, an occasion of good fortune — 慶, on the rising sắc tone.
- VinhVINGVietnamese
Glory, honour — 榮, a graph that pictured a tree in flower and moved from thriving to being held in high regard.
- BảoBOW, as in take a bowVietnamese
Treasure, something precious — 寶 in full, 宝 simplified: a roof over jade, a pot and a cowrie shell, which was the old money.
- ViệtVYETVietnamese
The Việt — the Vietnamese people themselves. As a Chinese word 越 means to cross over, but the graph's long career has been as a label for the peoples south of the Yangtze.
- NguyênNGWEE-uhnVietnamese
First, original, the head or source of a thing — 元, as in Tết Nguyên Đán, the festival of the first dawn. Not the surname: Nguyễn 阮, with the tilde and the creaky tone, is a different word that around two in five Vietnamese carry as a family name. Strip the marks and both come out Nguyen.
How Vietnamese naming works
A Vietnamese full name runs surname, middle name, given name — and it is the given name that does the work. Vietnamese people are addressed, introduced and alphabetised by the last element, so a man called Trần Văn Hùng is Mr Hùng, never Mr Trần. The reason is arithmetic: surnames are few and enormously concentrated, with Nguyễn alone covering roughly two in five people, so the family name identifies almost nobody. The middle slot used to be nearly automatic — Văn for a son, Thị for a daughter — and both have thinned out badly since the 1970s in favour of a second meaningful character, which is how the doubled given names of modern Vietnam (Minh Anh, Quang Huy) came about. Foreign forms fill in a first-name field with the last word on the page and get it right by accident.
The other thing to know is that the characters behind these names are no longer written. Vietnam used Chinese script and the home-grown chữ Nôm derived from it for most of a millennium; the Latin alphabet that Portuguese and French missionaries built, quốc ngữ, took over in the twentieth century and the old script went out of general use within a generation. So a Vietnamese speaker will tell you confidently that Đức means virtue and will very likely not be able to draw 德 — the meaning survived the script. What the alphabet does record precisely is tone, and the marks are letters' worth of information rather than accents: ê and ơ and đ are their own letters, and the hooks and tildes above them are the pitch. Set the results beside Chinese on the origins index and the overlap is obvious — Minh and Ming, Hải and Hai, Bảo and Bao are one character apiece, spoken in two languages.