Nora as a Chinese name seal: 诺拉

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

诺拉 breaks down as 诺 (nuò) — To promise, to assent. The word a ruler speaks once and a household lives by; 拉 (lā) — To draw, to pull toward. The cart’s word, the rope’s word, the hand’s word. The seal note we would put under it: Two-character seal: the word a promise is written with.

Pinyin: nuò lā — 诺 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop); 拉 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.

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. 拉 (lā) reads to draw, to pull toward. the cart’s word, the rope’s word, the hand’s word — and its own history runs: Not an old word at all, and the site’s only one of its kind: it was coined in the 1950s from 立 (to stand) and 扌 (the hand) for the physical act of tugging. Which makes it an unusually honest character — it means exactly what a hand does to a rope, and it borrowed the standing radical to do it.

8 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 诺亚 for Noah, 伊贝拉 for Isabella, 米拉 for Mila, 艾拉 for Ella, 斯特拉 for Stella, 丝拉 for Isla, 洛拉 for Lola, 诺兰 for Nolan. 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.

Nora is a diminutive with an untraceable pedigree — in English use it began as a pet form of Honora, and in Ireland as a shortening of Eleanor, so the name carries two separate inheritances: honor in the Anglo-American line, and ‘nun’ in the Irish one. By the time E. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 诺拉 — is in the section above.