Storm in Chinese: 司桐

Storm is written 司桐 in Mandarin (sī tóng) — one character for the surname 司 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Storm 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.

司桐 breaks down as 司 (sī) — To manage, to have charge — the officer of the weather; the sound of the name's start; 桐 (tóng) — Paulownia — the tree they plant and wait for the phoenix to land on; the wood of fine zithers, struck in storms. The seal note we would put under it: Two-character seal: the storm, put in charge of the phoenix tree.

Pinyin: sī tóng — 司 is tone 1 (a flat, level pitch held high); 桐 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.

司桐 is built from 司 and 桐 — 司 (sī), 桐 (tóng) — and no other curated name on this site shares that combination, because each entry is built around its own sound and its own meaning rather than recycled syllables. Names that start the same way as Storm are linked at the foot of this page.

Storm carries the sense The disturbed air, the tempest. The Chinese name 司桐 answers it with 司 (To manage, to have charge) and 桐 (Paulownia) — chosen for sound and sense together, the way a Chinese parent chooses a name rather than the way a wire service transliterates one. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 司桐 — is in the section above.