Naomi as a Chinese name seal: 娜美

Naomi is written 娜美 in Mandarin (nà měi) — one character for the surname 娜 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Naomi 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.

娜美 breaks down as 娜 (nà) — Graceful, the movement of a woman walking; 娜 in the Thousand Character Classic is the sound of a swaying bough; 美 (měi) — Beauty, as in 美玉 — the good stone. From 羊, the ram, wearing horns: strength wearing beauty. The seal note we would put under it: Two-character seal: grace that arrives, and stays sweet.

Pinyin: nà měi — 娜 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop); 美 is tone 3 (a dip down and back up). 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. 美 (měi) reads beauty, as in 美玉 — the good stone. from 羊, the ram, wearing horns: strength wearing beauty — and its own history runs: From 羊, the ram — a horned animal is beautiful, and the character is the animal wearing its horns. The judgment was made very early and never revised: strength wearing beauty. 美 is also the short form of the sense that made the word dangerous, since 美人 in classical Chinese means a beauty as in a beautiful man.

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

Hebrew nɔəmɔ’ — pleasantness, sweetness — is the name of a book in the Bible, and the reason it became a name: Naomi means what the Book of Ruth calls ‘the pleasantness of the Lord,’ said by a mother-in-law who is being as good as kin. It carried a second, sharper edge too — the root behind words for ‘favour,’ and Naomi was also a prophetess who told a king his own kingdom was doomed. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 娜美 — is in the section above.