Casey in Chinese: 卡西

Casey is written 卡西 in Mandarin (kǎ xī) — one character for the surname 卡 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Casey 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.

卡西 breaks down as 卡 (kǎ) — The checkpoint — the one who watches the pass; 西 (xī) — West — where the sun turns home. The seal note we would put under it: On watch where the road bends.

Pinyin: kǎ xī — 卡 is tone 3 (a dip down and back up); 西 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.

Because names in Chinese are chosen, not inherited by sound. 西 (xī) reads west — where the sun turns home — and its own history runs: From the gates of Spring-and-Autumn Zheng: the state’s ablest houses were lodged at its Eastgate, Westgate and Westsuburb, and when the state went under in the wars, gate-keeping families took the gate they kept as their surname. The famous Westgate name is Ximen Bao — the magistrate who threw the river-bride into the water and ended the human sacrifices of the Wei border towns. The character first is the bird roosting at sundown: the sunset direction.

7 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 洁西 for Jessie, 卡拉 for Calla, 卡特 for Carter, 卡托 for Kato, 西洲 for Theo, 西傲 for Theodore, 西马 for Thomas. 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.

Irish Cathasaigh, “watchful,” and immortalized by “Casey at the Bat” in 1888 — the most famous name in American verse. A surname that took the field and stayed on it. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 卡西 — is in the section above.