Lucy as a Chinese name seal: 露希

Lucy is written 露希 in Mandarin (lù xī) — one character for the surname 露 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Lucy 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.

露希 breaks down as 露 (lù) — Dew — the water that comes out of the night, and the verb ‘to reveal.’ The oracle bone is a road under a roof; 希 (xī) — Rare, few — and so, by the Book of Songs, the word for hope. One stroke, and everything leaning on it. The seal note we would put under it: Two-character seal: dew, and the light that gets through it.

Pinyin: lù xī — 露 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop); 希 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.

Because names in Chinese are chosen, not inherited by sound. 希 (xī) reads rare, few — and so, by the book of songs, the word for hope. one stroke, and everything leaning on it — and its own history runs: Rare, few — and so, by a turn the Book of Songs made permanent, the word for hope. The character is a cloth held up on a its loom, and only a few threads of it are left: 稀 the grain-sparse field, 希 the scanty remnant. What is scarce is what you wait for.

2 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 露娜 for Luna, 希楠 for Hazel. 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.

Lucy is Latin for ‘light’ — lux, of which it is the diminutive, the little light. It entered English through Old French luce in the Middle Ages, crossed into a Protestant hymn, and then sat out four centuries as a Victorian charactery: an idiot, a washerwoman, a bad girl in a music hall. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 露希 — is in the section above.