Austin as a Chinese name seal: 欧汀

Austin is written 欧汀 in Mandarin (ōu tīng) — one character for the surname 欧 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Austin 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.

欧汀 breaks down as 欧 (ōu) — Phonetic for the sound "O"; also Europe, and the ancient Ou region west of the passes — openness, a mouth open toward what is far off; 汀 (tīng) — The flat sand or shore where the water meets the land. A bank; the place a reed grows. The seal note we would put under it: Two-character seal: the western sound, and the reed’s bank.

Pinyin: ōu tīng — 欧 is tone 1 (a flat, level pitch held high); 汀 is tone 1 (a flat, level pitch held high). 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. 欧 (ōu) is one of the recorded Chinese surnames. From the house of Yue: Ou Yu, son of the last king of Yue, put on the outland march and took title over the lands where Ou and Yu meet; his line at first wrote itself Ou-Yang (on the south side of Ou’s hill), and some of it simply kept the first half. Xiu — the Song essayist — was of the whole name. The full account, with the character’s own etymology, is on the 欧 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. 汀 (tīng) reads the flat sand or shore where the water meets the land. a bank; the place a reed grows — and its own history runs: The flat sand or shore where the water meets the land — a bank, the place a reed grows. The water radical on a 丁, a nail driven into the ground: the marker that tells you where the water stops, and by extension the shallow water you can wade. 汀洲 is the word classical poems use for an island that is really a sandbar, and a landing nobody planned.

3 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 欧丽薇 for Olivia, 欧立 for Oliver, 欧文 for Owen. 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.

Austin is the English descendant of Latin Augustinus, from Augustus, itself augere, to increase — so, in the long chain, majestic, venerable, great. It left Italy as a given name in the Middle Ages, was carried to the Americas by Spanish and English speakers, and then did something very American: it became a first name, a surname, and a place name all at once, and the place won. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 欧汀 — is in the section above.