Owen as a Chinese name seal: 欧文

Owen is written 欧文 in Mandarin (ōu wén) — one character for the surname 欧 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Owen 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.

欧文 breaks down as 欧 (ōu) — Phonetic for the sound "O"; also Europe, and the ancient Ou region west of the passes — openness, a mouth open toward what is far off; 文 (wén) — Writing; a written text; culture, refinement. The character is a person with a mark on the breast. The seal note we would put under it: Two-character seal: the western sound, and the written thing.

Pinyin: ōu wén — 欧 is tone 1 (a flat, level pitch held high); 文 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. 欧 (ōu) is one of the recorded Chinese surnames. From the house of Yue: Ou Yu, son of the last king of Yue, put on the outland march and took title over the lands where Ou and Yu meet; his line at first wrote itself Ou-Yang (on the south side of Ou’s hill), and some of it simply kept the first half. Xiu — the Song essayist — was of the whole name. The full account, with the character’s own etymology, is on the 欧 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. 文 (wén) reads writing; a written text; culture, refinement. the character is a person with a mark on the breast — and its own history runs: A man (大, adult, arms wide) with crossed lines (交) on his chest: pattern — the crossed-stroke definition of the old gloss, body-paint before script. 错画也, says the Shuowen — and 纹 is what this letter became first, before literature borrowed the body.

4 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 欧丽薇 for Olivia, 欧立 for Oliver, 罗文 for Rowan, 欧汀 for Austin. 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.

Owen is Welsh Owain, and the etymology is genuinely uncertain: the standard guess is a Celtic word for well-born, and the competing guess is a form of the Latin Eugenius, well-born too — either way the name arrives at the same place, at the idea of noble birth, and is now worn by a very ordinary Englishman. The legend that it is a form of Ewan gives it a fourth-century saint, one of the founders of Welsh monasticism. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 欧文 — is in the section above.