A Chinese compound surname is a
Chinese surname
Chinese surnames are used by Han Chinese and Sinicized ethnic groups in China, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, and among overseas Chinese communities around the world such as Singapore and Malaysia. Written Chinese names begin with surnames, unlike the ...
using more than one
character
Character or Characters may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Literature
* ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk
* ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...
. Many of these
compound surname
In some cultures, a surname, family name, or last name is the portion of one's personal name that indicates one's family, tribe or community.
Practices vary by culture. The family name may be placed at either the start of a person's full name, ...
s derive from
Zhou dynasty Chinese noble and official titles, professions, place names and other areas, to serve a purpose. Some are originally from various tribes that lived in ancient China, while others were created by joining two one-character family names. Only a few of these names (e.g.
Ouyang 陽/欧阳 Shangguan 官 Sima 馬/司马 Zhuge 葛/诸葛 Situ 徒 Xiahou 侯 Huangfu
Huángfŭ (皇甫), alternatively pronounced Huangpu, is a Chinese compound surname. It's also called as ''Hwangbo'' (황보) in Korea and ''Hoàng Phủ'' in Vietnam.
Origins
In the early Zhou Dynasty, Huangfu is the name of Military Office of Z ...
甫 and
Huyan
The Huyan (; LHC: *''ha(C)-jan'' < (~200 BCE): *''hɑ-janH/B'') was a noble house that led the last rem ...
延 can still be found quite commonly in modern times with Ouyang, Shangguan, Sima and Situ appearing most frequently. Many clans eventually took on a single-character surname for various reasons. Chinese surnames with more than two characters are mostly not of ethnic Chinese origin (e.g.
Xianbei or
Turkic
Turkic may refer to:
* anything related to the country of Turkey
* Turkic languages, a language family of at least thirty-five documented languages
** Turkic alphabets (disambiguation)
** Turkish language, the most widely spoken Turkic language
* ...
), and are becoming exceedingly rare to find, but are still in use today.
Lists below are arranged alphabetically by their Mandarin
pinyin spellings.
Native Chinese compound surnames
Double-barrelled surnames
Double-barrelled surname () occurs sometimes when both families of a marriage wish to pass down their surnames, or when a child wishes to commemorate both the biological and foster parents. This is often distinguished from compound surnames (), which cannot be split into two single-character surnames. A doubled-barrelled surname is also distinguished from a
married name
When a person (traditionally the wife in many cultures) assumes the family name of their spouse, in some countries that name replaces the person's previous surname, which in the case of the wife is called the maiden name ("birth name" is also used ...
(), as married names are not passed down to the next generations.
Non-Han surnames
Peoples other than Han have resided in China and have their names transliterated into Chinese. A large number of these non-Han surnames contain more than one Chinese character.
See also
{{wiktionary, Chinese compound surnames
*
Chinese surname
Chinese surnames are used by Han Chinese and Sinicized ethnic groups in China, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, and among overseas Chinese communities around the world such as Singapore and Malaysia. Written Chinese names begin with surnames, unlike the ...
*
Japanese surname
*
Korean surname
*
Vietnamese name
External links
The Ten-Thousand Families of Surnames from Netor (NETOR纪念:万家姓氏) (in simplified Chinese only)