Penelope in Chinese: 彭洛

Penelope is written 彭洛 in Mandarin (péng luò) — one character for the surname 彭 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Penelope 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.

彭洛 breaks down as 彭 (péng) — Peng — surname of Peng Zu, the old sage who kept his years beyond counting; 洛 (luò) — The Luo River — beauty that moves. The seal note we would put under it: A weaver’s patience, a sage’s years.

Pinyin: péng luò — 彭 is tone 2 (a rising pitch, like the start of a question); 洛 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.

Yes. 彭 (péng) is one of the recorded Chinese surnames. From Pengzu, the Pen-pounder of legend, said to have lived eight hundred years by swallowing the breath of morning — grandson of the mythical Luzhong, enfeoffed at Greater Peng in the Shang era, chief of the eight hundred years’ dawn-eater. The character keeps 彡 for his drum’s three beats and the sound of his name. The full account, with the character’s own etymology, is on the 彭 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. 洛 (luò) reads the luo river — beauty that moves — and its own history runs: 各 the coming-and-going under 水: the river that came down from 终山 to run through the capital 洛阳 where the city was built. The river at Luoyang, where peonies were bred, gives its name to any 洛 in a name.

5 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 克洛 for Chloe, 洛拉 for Lola, 米洛 for Milo, 诗洛 for Shiloh, 夏洛 for Charlotte. 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.

Greek "weaver" — Odysseus' wife held Ithaca for twenty years with a shroud she un-wove every night. The oldest word for patience, with a name. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 彭洛 — is in the section above.