Blake as a Chinese name seal: 布莱克

Blake is written 布莱克 in Mandarin (bù lái kè) — one character for the surname 布 and two for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Blake 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.

布莱克 breaks down as 布 (bù) — To spread, to announce, to lay out; also plain cloth, and a people who raised the silk; 莱 (lái) — The herb that grows on the river bank — and the bitter weed the Book of Songs names twice, for the same plant; 克 (kè) — To be able to, to overcome, to be equal to a thing. The word on every ancient oath of victory. The seal note we would put under it: Three characters: a full classical seal face, and a name that means the night sky.

Pinyin: bù lái kè — 布 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop); 莱 is tone 2 (a rising pitch, like the start of a question); 克 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.

Because names in Chinese are chosen, not inherited by sound. 克 (kè) reads to be able to, to overcome, to be equal to a thing. the word on every ancient oath of victory — and its own history runs: The oracle bone draws a hand lifting a roasted piece of meat from the mouth — the ability to shoulder what was promised, so the old gloss says: 克 means to carry it, hence to vanquish. 克 in every oath the Zhou bronze casts is a victory the bronze itself agreed to keep.

4 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 克洛 for Chloe, 莱雅 for Layla, 卢克 for Luke, 莱维 for Levi. 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.

Blake is Old English blæc, dark or black — the word in Chaucer’s Troilus, in the pit, and in a surname that became famous when William Blake, engraver and prophet, answered to it. As a given name it spent most of the twentieth century as a surname and came back from 2013, when the gothic and folk revival met a name that was already only one syllable. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 布莱克 — is in the section above.