Nolan as a Chinese name seal: 诺兰

Nolan is written 诺兰 in Mandarin (nuò lán) — one character for the surname 诺 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Nolan 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.

诺兰 breaks down as 诺 (nuò) — To promise, to assent. The word a ruler speaks once and a household lives by; 兰 (lán) — The orchid — and, standing alone in an old hand, the word for the scent of the orchid alone. The seal note we would put under it: Two-character seal: a promise kept, and the scent of the orchid.

Pinyin: nuò lán — 诺 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop); 兰 is tone 2 (a rising pitch, like the start of a question). 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. 诺 (nuò) is one of the recorded Chinese surnames. The yes on the tongue: the 讠 mouth answering 若 — so be it. Ji Bu of Chu, whose one yes was said to outweigh a thousand in gold, signed no character that did not 诺; the first of the Qin’s ministers got his empire’s seal by keeping this word. Chinese answer Western names with their yes — the promise made syllable. The full account, with the character’s own etymology, is on the 诺 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. 兰 (lán) reads the orchid — and, standing alone in an old hand, the word for the scent of the orchid alone — and its own history runs: The orchid — 蘭, of which the simplified form kept only the first and last strokes, the argument the flower makes by itself. The word was also used standing alone in an old hand for the scent of the orchid alone, which is what Wang Xizhi’s 兰亭序 is about: forty friends, a wine cup, and the smell of the plants, the one thing the gathering agreed not to regret. 兰 has been fragrance in a high register ever since.

2 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 诺亚 for Noah, 诺拉 for Nora. 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.

Nolan is Irish and means, roughly, little lion — from the abbú, the superlative ‘larger than all,’ a word that survived in a dozen names. It is a Christopher Nolan of a name, and as a given name it rode two separate waves: Nolan, the son of the second Nolan Bush, into the American top twenty in 2014, and then the whole family of Irish n-names that followed. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 诺兰 — is in the section above.