About SealsCrafter an independent name-seal workshop
A free tool that turns an English name into a Chinese name a person can actually use — and carves it in the seal script of the Zhongshan King bronzes.
What this site does
Type an English name and SealsCrafter gives you back a Chinese name — surname and given name, in characters that are really used as names — then carves it into a seal (印, chop, hanko) in authentic seal script and exports a transparent PNG you can print, stamp into a document, or hand to a stone carver as artwork.
No account, no login, no paywall. The carving runs in your browser, so the names you type stay on your machine.
Why it exists
Search for “Chinese name generator” and most results give you one of two things: a phonetic string of characters with no meaning, or a random beautiful character with no relationship to your name. Both are useless the moment a Chinese speaker reads them.
So every entry here is built the other way round. A name gets either its established transliteration — the characters Chinese speakers already use for it, such as 迈克尔 for Michael — or a curated character-by-character name chosen for both sound and meaning, with each character explained. Ruby becomes 如碧, and the page tells you what 如 and 碧 each carry. Nothing is drawn at random.
How the names are made and checked
The name tables are hand-built, not generated. Each entry records the surname, the given name, a one-line meaning, the meaning of every character used, and a seal note. A surname is only used if it is a real Chinese surname; a character is only used in a given name if it is actually chosen as a name character rather than merely meaning something nice.
Every character also has to survive the font pipeline: a character is admitted only if the seal-script font can genuinely draw it, with real strokes. Characters the main font lacks are served from a supplement — never faked with a placeholder glyph. That check runs on every build and fails the build when it regresses.
The script and the fonts
The engraving follows the Zhongshan King (中山王) bronze-inscription school of seal script — slender, swaying Warring-States lines from the tombs of Zhongshan, 314 BCE — instead of imitating a modern typeface.
The main font is JFZSKSealScript, released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Characters missing from it are drawn from the Academia Sinica’s Chongxi Small Seal (崇羲篆體) by Wang Xinyi and Ji Xusheng, used under CC-BY-ND 3.0 TW. Both licences are linked in the footer and their texts ship with the site.
Corrections are welcome
If a name on this site is wrong — a character that is not used as a name, a bad tone, a surname that does not exist — write to [email protected] and it gets fixed. Corrections from native speakers are the main way the tables improve, and the fix lands for everyone rather than in a private reply.
How it is funded
The site is free and carries advertising, which is the whole business model — there is no paid tier and nothing is held back behind one. That is also why the site aims to be worth reading rather than merely clickable: a page here should answer the question you arrived with, whether or not you ever press the generate button.