Alice in Chinese: 艾丽

Alice is written 艾丽 in Mandarin (ài lì) — one character for the surname 艾 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Alice rather than to transliterate it letter by letter, which is how Chinese names are actually made. On this page the seal is carved in the Zhongshan King (中山王) bronze-inscription seal script, with the Academia Sinica Chongxi Small Seal (崇羲篆體) filling any character the main font lacks.

艾丽 breaks down as 艾 (ài) — A fragrant moxa-family herb; 丽 (lì) — Beautiful, luminous. The seal note we would put under it: Nobility kept small and bright.

Pinyin: ài lì — 艾 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop); 丽 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop). Mandarin has four tones plus a neutral tone, and getting them wrong is the most common mistake Western speakers make with Chinese names — the seal itself is unaffected, since the carving is of the written form.

Yes. 艾 (ài) is one of the recorded Chinese surnames. Two old lines made the surname. A prince of the state of Wei was enfeoffed at a place called Ai and his house kept the place after him; and a grandson of Confucius’s own Kong line hid from the civil wars at Ai Rise (艾陵, in today’s Shandong) and signed the ground as his name instead. The character is older than both: 艾 is mugwort — the moxa herb the Book of Songs already gathered for healing. The full account, with the character’s own etymology, is on the 艾 surname page — and that lineage is the reason a Western name can borrow the character for a surname at all.

Because names in Chinese are chosen, not inherited by sound. 丽 (lì) reads beautiful, luminous — and its own history runs: The oracle bone pairs two deer walking side by side — 鹿 both, and one. Beauty that travels in pairs: 丽 is fair by arrangement, and a mountain named by a god who took his consort to it. 高, tall, and 丽, set together.

28 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 阿丽雅 for Aria, 艾贝 for Abigail, 艾德里安 for Adrian, 艾登 for Aiden, 艾诗 for Ash, 艾萍 for Aspen, 艾丝特 for Aster, 艾华 for Ava, and more. Chinese names combine a family name with one or two given-name characters, so a single character can carry a hundred different people; the character page above lists every name that uses it.

The Old French form of Adalheidis, "noble kind." Lewis Carroll sent a girl named Alice down a rabbit hole in 1865, and the name has worn a Victorian dress ever since — quietly, elegantly, forever. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 艾丽 — is in the section above.