Chinesecharacter-dependent1 syllable
Meaning: depends entirely on the character — 伟 great, 威 power, 卫 to guard.
Wei
| Origin | Chinese — one syllable written with several unrelated characters, given after the surname |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Character-dependent. 伟 wěi great, grand, extraordinary; 威 wēi power, might, the awe authority commands; 卫 wèi to guard, to defend; 维 wéi to bind together, to maintain |
| Pronunciation | WAY. The tone changes with the character, and all four tones are in live use for this name, so two men called Wei may not be saying quite the same syllable |
| Common characters | 伟 by a distance, then 威, 卫 and 维; also 玮 a fine jade, and 巍 towering, said of mountains |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100; rare in America. In China among the most-given names of the past century, and 张伟 Zhang Wei is regularly reported as the country's commonest full name |
| Variants | Wei in both pinyin and Wade-Giles; Cantonese gives Wai, as in the Hong Kong spelling Chiu-wai |
| Nicknames | 小伟 Xiao Wei in Mandarin; 阿伟 A-Wai in Cantonese-speaking families |
History & meaning
Wei is the best illustration this site can offer of the rule that governs every Chinese name: the meaning lives in the character, not in the sound. Written 伟, the name means great or extraordinary. The graph is 亻, a person, beside 韦 for the sound, and it is the 伟 of 伟大, the ordinary adjective for greatness. Written 威 it is a different word: power, and specifically the kind that produces deference, the 威 of dignity and of threat. Written 卫 it is not an adjective at all but a verb, to guard, the character that names bodyguards and satellites. Written 维 it means to tie or hold together. Nothing in the romanisation distinguishes them, and the tone does not help either, since between them these characters use all four.
伟 took off in the second half of the twentieth century and never really came down, which is how a country of a billion people ends up with Zhang Wei as its single commonest full name, a statistic that surfaces every few years in official name reports and delights Chinese social media each time. The scale of it is worth keeping in mind when reading transliterated names in English: even a familiar Wei may be a character you have not met. The artist Ai Weiwei's Weiwei, for instance, is 未未, meaning not yet, a fifth character again. When Chinese names cross into an alphabet they lose the one thing that carried their meaning.
Why parents choose it
伟 says something large in one plain syllable, without borrowing a myth or a classical allusion to do it. It also lands cleanly in English, as WAY, which puts it in a small group of Mandarin names that need no coaching. The ambiguity this page has spent so long on is invisible in daily life, since a family knows perfectly well which character it chose.
Middle names for Wei
An open diphthong ending takes a firm consonant well: Wei Alexander, Wei Theodore. Held in the middle position it stays intact for relatives while the first name does the day-to-day work, as in Jordan Wei and Cameron Wei. The middle names guide explains why the shorter name usually belongs second.
Famous Weis
Tony Leung Chiu-wai, the Hong Kong actor of In the Mood for Love and Infernal Affairs, carries 偉 as the second half of his given name; Cantonese romanises it Wai, Mandarin reads it Wei, and it is the same character in both. On the mainland the name's fame is statistical rather than personal. There are so many Zhang Weis that Chinese newspapers have run features on the confusion, and the anonymity of the name has become a standing joke about it.
Consider instead
Qiang 强 is strength stated as plainly as 伟 states greatness, and belongs to the same generation of names. Jie 杰 marks somebody outstanding, a standout rather than a great. Ming 明 is brightness and clarity, and unlike Wei it has essentially one writing.