Luke as a Chinese name seal: 卢克

Luke is written 卢克 in Mandarin (lú kè) — one character for the surname 卢 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Luke 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.

卢克 breaks down as 卢 (lú) — A black horse — the character is a black on the upper part, the dark war-horse on its own; 克 (kè) — To be able to, to overcome, to be equal to a thing. The word on every ancient oath of victory. The seal note we would put under it: Two-character seal: a black horse, and the word for being able to.

Pinyin: lú kè — 卢 is tone 2 (a rising pitch, like the start of a question); 克 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. 克 (kè) reads to be able to, to overcome, to be equal to a thing. the word on every ancient oath of victory — and its own history runs: The oracle bone draws a hand lifting a roasted piece of meat from the mouth — the ability to shoulder what was promised, so the old gloss says: 克 means to carry it, hence to vanquish. 克 in every oath the Zhou bronze casts is a victory the bronze itself agreed to keep.

2 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 克洛 for Chloe, 布莱克 for Blake. 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.

Luke is the Latinised form of Loukas, a Greek name with a famously bad backstory: in the third century a certain Loukas was a painter whose work Christian parents refused, having been told to ‘go and paint shipwrecks’ — and from that insult the name went, by way of tradition, to the Evangelist. The rest is a life: physician, painter, companion of Paul, martyr. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 卢克 — is in the section above.