Lily in Chinese: 莉丽

Lily is written 莉丽 in Mandarin (lì lì) — one character for the surname 莉 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Lily 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.

莉丽 breaks down as 莉 (lì) — Jasmine — small, white and relentless in summer fragrance; 丽 (lì) — Beautiful, luminous. The seal note we would put under it: Flower-and-beauty: a name that blooms on paper.

Pinyin: lì lì — 莉 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop); 丽 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. 莉 (lì) is one of the recorded Chinese surnames. 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. The full account, with the character’s own etymology, is on the 莉 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. 丽 (lì) reads beautiful, luminous — and its own history runs: The oracle bone pairs two deer walking side by side — 鹿 both, and one. Beauty that travels in pairs: 丽 is fair by arrangement, and a mountain named by a god who took his consort to it. 高, tall, and 丽, set together.

16 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 阿丽雅 for Aria, 艾丽 for Alice, 艾丽 for Elia, 艾莉 for Ellie, 欧瑞莉 for Aurelia, 哈莉 for Hali, 基莉 for Keely, 嘉丽 for Caroline, 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 the lily flower — Latin lilium, straight from the fields the Greeks and Romans wove into wreaths. The Victorians made it a name of maiden-purity; the twenty-first century put it back in the sun. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 莉丽 — is in the section above.