Lucas in Chinese: 陆嘉

Lucas is written 陆嘉 in Mandarin (lù jiā) — one character for the surname 陆 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Lucas 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.

陆嘉 breaks down as 陆 (lù) — Land, high ground — steadiness; 嘉 (jiā) — Excellent, praiseworthy — the word used in wedding blessings. The seal note we would put under it: Land and praise: light rooted in ground.

Pinyin: lù jiā — 陆 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop); 嘉 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. 陆 (lù) is one of the recorded Chinese surnames. Traditional accounts run 陆 back to Luzhong, grandson of the high emperor in the old mythologies; a later branch came from a younger son of the kings of Qi, enfeoffed at Lu in today’s Shandong. The Wu of the Three Kingdoms had the Lu family in its first rank of gentry; the character keeps 阝, the mound-hill of a fief. The full account, with the character’s own etymology, is on the 陆 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. 嘉 (jiā) reads excellent, praiseworthy — the word used in wedding blessings — and its own history runs: 加, the increasing, over 壴 the drum-stand on its base — the feast, the toast, the fine — the celebration of what you approve is built into the character’s table and its praise.

4 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 嘉丽 for Caroline, 嘉宝 for Jasper, 斯嘉 for Scarlett, 素嘉 for Sora. 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.

Greek "light-giving." Luke the evangelist was the patron of painters, and the filmmaker George Lucas gave the name a studio, a wizard war, and half of a generation's baby announcements. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 陆嘉 — is in the section above.