Elijah in Chinese: 伊立

Elijah is written 伊立 in Mandarin (yī lì) — one character for the surname 伊 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Elijah 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.

伊立 breaks down as 伊 (yī) — The classical pronoun — a person of poise; 立 (lì) — To stand, to establish — resolve and self-reliance. The seal note we would put under it: The prophet’s stance: standing when the crowd sits.

Pinyin: yī lì — 伊 is tone 1 (a flat, level pitch held high); 立 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. 伊 (yī) is one of the recorded Chinese surnames. From Yi Yin, found as a mulberry-born child raising his mother’s clan’s grain in the fields of Xin, bought out of bondage by Tang of Shang as a dowry servant, and raised to prime minister — the man who exiled a bad king and handed the realm back penitent. His people took his land’s name; 伊 keeps the 亻 of that self-made minister. The full account, with the character’s own etymology, is on the 伊 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. 立 (lì) reads to stand, to establish — resolve and self-reliance — and its own history runs: The oldest picture is the act: 大, a person, standing on 一, the ground — upright, established, set up. As a surname it is rare and late; on this site 立 answers the Li-/Lee- sounds of Western names with the verb for standing straight.

9 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 安立 for Alexander, 立安 for Liam, 欧立 for Oliver, 伊丽安 for Eliana, 伊利 for Elizabeth, 伊林 for Ethan, 伊莫珍 for Imogen, 伊贝拉 for Isabella, 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.

Hebrew "my God is Yahweh." The prophet of fire who, tradition says, still visits every Passover table — an old name kept warm by ritual, and now one of the most-recorded boys' names in America. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 伊立 — is in the section above.