David in Chinese: 大维

David is written 大维 in Mandarin (dà wéi) — one character for the surname 大 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of David 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.

大维 breaks down as 大 (dà) — Great — the one stroke that spans heaven, earth and the person between; 维 (wéi) — The great cord that holds the net of the world together — to keep order. The seal note we would put under it: Beloved, great, and holding the threads.

Pinyin: dà wéi — 大 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop); 维 is tone 2 (a rising pitch, like the start of a question). 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. 大 (dà) is one of the recorded Chinese surnames. An ancient character and an old surname that almost none still sign — in Zhou times it carried the rank of great, and the few houses that kept it mostly changed into 戴 or 泰 by the Han; the character itself — an adult with arms flung wide — keeps the size as its meaning. The full account, with the character’s own etymology, is on the 大 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. 维 (wéi) reads the great cord that holds the net of the world together — to keep order — and its own history runs: To hold together, to bind — and the rope a net-rides on at the corner, the one that keeps a square square. The character is 纟 beside 隹, a thread and a bird: something tethered, holding its shape. In long usage it became the verb of maintaining, 维持, which is the same idea: the thing is up only as long as the rope holds.

5 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 哈维 for Harvey, 拉维 for Ravi, 莱维 for Levi, 维多 for Victoria, 维安 for Vivian. 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.

Hebrew "beloved." The shepherd boy who became king and psalmist; Michelangelo carved it into marble; a thousand years of European kings signed this name into treaties — and it never went out of style. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 大维 — is in the section above.