Jasmine in Chinese: 茉莉

Jasmine is written 茉莉 in Mandarin (mò lì) — one character for the surname 茉 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Jasmine 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.

茉莉 breaks down as 茉 (mò) — Jasmine — the small white flower of summer nights; 莉 (lì) — Jasmine again: relentless fragrance. The seal note we would put under it: The scent worn in the hair.

Pinyin: mò lì — 茉 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop); 莉 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.

Because names in Chinese are chosen, not inherited by sound. 莉 (lì) reads jasmine again: relentless fragrance — and its own history runs: The jasmine under the grass radical, and the only word Chinese has for it. 莉 has no surname lineage of its own — a flower-name that modern naming, and China’s transliterations of Lily and Lily-sounds, adopted for its scent and its grass.

8 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 艾莉 for Ellie, 欧瑞莉 for Aurelia, 哈莉 for Hali, 基莉 for Keely, 莉丽 for Lily, 莉拉 for Lira, 茉莉 for Molly, 塔莉 for Talia. 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 the Persian yasmin through Arabic into every garden on earth — and 茉莉 in Chinese, the flower worn in the hair and sung about for a thousand years. The scent is the name. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 茉莉 — is in the section above.