Thomas in Chinese: 西马

Thomas is written 西马 in Mandarin (xī mǎ) — one character for the surname 西 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Thomas 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.

西马 breaks down as 西 (xī) — West — the sun in the tree at the day's end: the direction the old syllables came from; 马 (mǎ) — Horse — the stroke-drawn animal of wind, travel and the road, one of the great zodiac beasts. The seal note we would put under it: The twin, westward and mounted: two hard characters, a wide face.

Pinyin: xī mǎ — 西 is tone 1 (a flat, level pitch held high); 马 is tone 3 (a dip down and back up). 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. 西 (xī) is one of the recorded Chinese surnames. From the gates of Spring-and-Autumn Zheng: the state’s ablest houses were lodged at its Eastgate, Westgate and Westsuburb, and when the state went under in the wars, gate-keeping families took the gate they kept as their surname. The famous Westgate name is Ximen Bao — the magistrate who threw the river-bride into the water and ended the human sacrifices of the Wei border towns. The character first is the bird roosting at sundown: the sunset direction. The full account, with the character’s own etymology, is on the 西 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. 马 (mǎ) reads horse — the stroke-drawn animal of wind, travel and the road, one of the great zodiac beasts — and its own history runs: The horse’s surname. She, a general of Zhao, won so high a title as Horse-Service Lord that his house simply shortened it and kept 马. Two thousand years later Ma still carries horses in its strokes, and its most famous bearer — Yuan, the Han general who buried his hero in a horse-hide — galloped the name into the classics.

6 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 洁西 for Jessie, 卡西 for Casey, 马山 for Mason, 马特 for Matthew, 西洲 for Theo, 西傲 for Theodore. 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.

Thomas carries the sense Twin (Aramaic te'oma). The Chinese name 西马 answers it with 西 (West) and 马 (Horse) — 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 西马 — is in the section above.