Chinese girl names: a list with meanings and pronunciation

October 13, 2026 · 9 min read

Chinese girl names are usually one or two characters, and each one means something: Li is "beautiful", Xue is "snow", Yulan is "jade orchid". Below is a list of about sixty female Chinese names with characters, pinyin and meanings: beautiful names by theme, names popular right now and rare ones. And before the list, the characters that female names are most often built from.

How female Chinese names differ from male ones

Chinese has no fixed stock of names like Anna or Sophia. A name is put together from ordinary words: parents choose one or two characters with a good meaning. So a name has no grammatical "feminine form" either — gender is read from the meaning of the characters.

For girls, parents more often pick characters about beauty and grace, flowers and birds, precious stones, moonlight, and gentle qualities — calm, purity, intelligence. Male names have more strength, greatness and scope. The look of a character is a clue too: many "female" characters contain the radical 女 "woman" — 娜, 婷, 妍; flower names contain the "grass" radical 艹: 芳, 兰, 莲.

The line isn't strict. 文 "culture", 明 "bright", 华 "splendor" and 晨 "morning" are used for everyone, and the name alone doesn't always tell you the gender. How Chinese names work in general is explained in the main article on Chinese names.

The most common characters in Chinese girl names

These sixteen characters are worth knowing on sight: a good share of female names is made of them — alone and in pairs.

Note that 美 "lovely" and 梅 "plum blossom" are both spelled "Mei" in a passport, but they are different words with different tones: měi and méi. English spelling drops the tone, so it's safer to learn a name together with its tone-marked pinyin.

Beautiful Chinese girl names with meanings

In each group, one-character names come first, then two-character ones. In English a two-syllable given name is written as one word: Xuemei, not "Xue Mei".

Flowers and nature

In Chinese culture the orchid, the lotus, the chrysanthemum and the winter plum stand for resilience and purity: the plum blossoms while snow is still on the ground, and the lotus rises from muddy water unstained.

Beauty and grace

The biggest group: the name says outright how the parents see their daughter.

Mind and character

Here what counts is calm, a sharp mind and learning. Characters about poetry and books are especially loved in the names of recent decades.

Light and precious things

In China jade was valued above gold, which is why there are so many jade characters: 玉, 琳, 珍. Next to them come the moon, the dawn and the color red.

Two names on the list look the same in English: 静 jìng "calm" and 晶 jīng "crystal" are both Jing. In Chinese you can't mix them up — different characters and different tones.

Popular girl names in China right now

Girls born in recent years almost always get a two-character name with a literary ring. These turn up again and again on lists of popular names of recent years — the order in the table is arbitrary:

You can see how the set of characters has changed: instead of the familiar 丽 and 芳, there's 涵 "depth", 怡 "delight", 萱 "daylily", and the trees 梓 and 桐. 雨桐 and 语桐 sound exactly the same, even in Chinese — only the first character tells them apart. And Zixuan can also be a boy's name, but then it's written with other characters: 子轩.

Rare and unusual Chinese girl names

Two things make a Chinese name rare: an uncommon character or an unexpected combination — often words from old poetry. You won't meet these names often, but they stick in the memory.

婉兮 and 攸宁 come from the Book of Songs, the oldest collection of Chinese poetry; the particle 兮 dropped out of everyday speech long ago. A rare name has a downside: not everyone reads an unusual character at first sight, and it often has to be explained.

Modern girl names and names of the older generation

Name fashions in China change just as they do in English-speaking countries. Older women more often have names made of simple, down-to-earth characters: Xiuying, Guiying, Xiulan, Yuzhen, Shuhua. Women born in the second half of the twentieth century often have short one-character names — Li, Min, Jing, Fang, Hong.

Girls of recent decades more often get two-character names, more literary and rarer in sound: Xinyi, Shihan, Yating, Chenxi. That's an observation, not a rule: Xuemei or Wenjing can be a grandmother or a schoolgirl.

Female Chinese names with surnames

In China the surname comes first, the given name second. There are no special female surnames: a daughter gets the same surname as a son, with nothing added to it. After marriage, Chinese women usually keep their own surname.

Here is how full names made of the most common surnames and given names look — there are a great many people with these combinations:

• 王丽wánglìWang Lisurname Wang + "beautiful"
• 李娜lǐnàLi Nasurname Li + "graceful"
• 张敏zhāngmǐnZhang Minsurname Zhang + "quick-witted"
• 刘芳liúfāngLiu Fangsurname Liu + "fragrant"
• 陈静chénjìngChen Jingsurname Chen + "calm"

In English the surname and given name are written separately, each with a capital letter, and in Chinese order: Wang Li is Ms. Wang. Abroad she may write it Western-style, Li Wang, so it helps to ask which is which. When choosing a name, Chinese parents make sure it sounds good next to the surname and doesn't combine with it into an unlucky word. More on the most common surnames in the article "Chinese surnames".

How to pronounce Chinese girl names

Every syllable in a name has its own tone — the melody of the voice. It's part of the name: Mei in the third tone and Mei in the second are two different names. Tap a syllable to hear it:

• Fourth tone, the voice drops sharply: lì丽 nà娜 jìng静 huì慧 yù玉 yuè月
• Second tone, the voice rises: tíng婷 lán兰 méi梅
• Third tone, low: mǐn敏 xuě雪
• First tone, high and level: fāng芳

A two-syllable name is read straight through, with no pause: Xuemei — xuě méi, Lina — lì nà. Watch the letters that don't sound like English: x is roughly "sh" with the tongue tip behind the lower teeth, so Xue is close to "shweh"; ü (written u after x, j, q, y) is "ee" said with rounded lips; and the j in Jing is softer than in "jeep". How each pinyin letter is read is covered in the article on Chinese sounds, and you can hear any syllable in all four tones in the pinyin chart.