Luna in Chinese: 露娜

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

露娜 breaks down as 露 (lù) — Dew — night’s water on morning leaves; also "to reveal"; 娜 (nà) — Grace of movement, a willow in wind. The seal note we would put under it: Moonlight rendered as dew and sway.

Pinyin: lù nà — 露 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop); 娜 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. 娜 (nà) reads grace of movement, a willow in wind — and its own history runs: Graceful, the movement of a woman walking — the Thousand Character Classic uses it for the sound of a swaying bough, 娿娜, which is the bough and not the woman. The character is 女 beside 那, the word for “that” and a question: what is she doing? Answer: swaying.

9 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 道尔菲娜 for Delphine, 汉娜 for Hannah, 乐娜 for Lena, 露希 for Lucy, 娜雅 for Inaya, 娜美 for Naomi, 瑟瑞娜 for Serena, 珊娜 for Sana, 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.

The Roman moon goddess who drove her silver chariot across the night — Latin's oldest sky-name, now among its fastest-rising, on young parents' lips and trotting up a Hogwarts staircase. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 露娜 — is in the section above.