Ella in Chinese: 艾拉

Ella is written 艾拉 in Mandarin (ài lā) — one character for the surname 艾 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Ella 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.

艾拉 breaks down as 艾 (ài) — A fragrant moxa herb; 拉 (lā) — To draw toward — the diminutive that grew up. The seal note we would put under it: Small name, whole meaning.

Pinyin: ài lā — 艾 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop); 拉 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. 艾 (ài) is one of the recorded Chinese surnames. Two old lines made the surname. A prince of the state of Wei was enfeoffed at a place called Ai and his house kept the place after him; and a grandson of Confucius’s own Kong line hid from the civil wars at Ai Rise (艾陵, in today’s Shandong) and signed the ground as his name instead. The character is older than both: 艾 is mugwort — the moxa herb the Book of Songs already gathered for healing. The full account, with the character’s own etymology, is on the 艾 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. 拉 (lā) reads to draw toward — the diminutive that grew up — and its own history runs: Not an old word at all, and the site’s only one of its kind: it was coined in the 1950s from 立 (to stand) and 扌 (the hand) for the physical act of tugging. Which makes it an unusually honest character — it means exactly what a hand does to a rope, and it borrowed the standing radical to do it.

40 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 艾贝 for Abigail, 艾德里安 for Adrian, 艾登 for Aiden, 艾丽 for Alice, 艾诗 for Ash, 艾萍 for Aspen, 艾丝特 for Aster, 艾华 for Ava, 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.

A Germanic diminutive that outgrew every longer name it came from, standing alone since the Middle Ages. The fairy-tale heroine who refused to be ordered around helped carry it back to the top twenty. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 艾拉 — is in the section above.