Emily in Chinese: 艾米

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

艾米 breaks down as 艾 (ài) — A fragrant moxa-family herb; 米 (mǐ) — Rice, grain — sustenance, the base of a good life. The seal note we would put under it: Striving that comes home to the dinner table.

Pinyin: ài mǐ — 艾 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop); 米 is tone 3 (a dip down and back up). 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. 米 (mǐ) reads rice, grain — sustenance, the base of a good life — and its own history runs: A surname that rode the Silk Road east. The state of Mi (Mayurg, near modern Samarkand in today’s Uzbekistan) sent princes to stay in the Tang as sureties, and they stayed and signed; among them were generals, envoys, and finally a calligrapher so strange that posterity remembers only his title — Master Mi, the erratic of Song. 米 is the one of the Nine Sogdian names that still lives full-grown in China today.

26 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.

From Latin "rival, eager." Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights and Emily Dickinson wrote nearly two thousand renegade poems in a white dress: the name of two of the fiercest voices English ever held. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 艾米 — is in the section above.