Violet in Chinese: 紫罗

Violet is written 紫罗 in Mandarin (zǐ luó) — one character for the surname 紫 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Violet 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.

紫罗 breaks down as 紫 (zǐ) — Violet: the dye emperors reserved and flowers borrowed; 罗 (luó) — Fine gauze — the fabric of delicacy. The seal note we would put under it: A flower wearing an imperial colour.

Pinyin: zǐ luó — 紫 is tone 3 (a dip down and back up); 罗 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.

Because names in Chinese are chosen, not inherited by sound. 罗 (luó) reads fine gauze — the fabric of delicacy — and its own history runs: The original graph is a net hung on a frame for birds: 罗, a net, and so the verb to collect. It was simplified from 羅 and kept only the net, but the collecting sense stayed — 收集, 網羅, 罗织, to net someone in with words. 网 in modern form: the net, and the act of the net.

2 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 罗丝 for Rose, 罗文 for Rowan. 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.

The Latin viola, worn in the Victorian language of flowers for faithfulness, then brought back by the generation that brought back all the botanical names. It wears the one colour emperors reserved and flowers borrowed. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 紫罗 — is in the section above.