姓名學
Chinese name calculator
A different tradition from everything else on this site. Not Chaldean numerology with Chinese characters poured into it — the actual stroke-count method, in which a name becomes five grids and each grid is read against a table of eighty-one numbers. Enter a surname and your shortlist.
The name
Simplified or traditional — both are accepted, and simplified characters are converted to their traditional forms before counting, because that is what the tradition counts.
Two-character surnames — 歐陽, 司馬, 諸葛 — go in whole. They change every grid.
Each is scored out of 100 on its own — 50 is neutral. Adding more candidates never changes an existing score.
Enter a surname and at least one given name, and the five grids appear here.
A name written down permanently
A name in a family register is one kind of record. A dedicated star is another — in a catalogue, with a date, and not subject to anybody's revision.
Find a star to dedicate →Disclaimer: the stroke counts and the arithmetic are exact and shown in full. What each of the eighty-one numbers means is tradition — 姓名學 as systematised by Kumasaki Kenō in the twentieth century, not a scientific finding. Schools disagree about several numbers, and where they do this page takes the middle grade rather than the flattering one. Nothing here predicts a person's health, ability or fate.
Why the strokes are not the strokes you see
姓名學 counts 康熙字典 strokes, in which a radical is counted as its original full form. 氵 counts four, as 水. 艹 counts six, as 艸. 阝 counts eight on the left, as 阜, and seven on the right, as 邑. So 江 is six strokes on the page and seven in the count, and 蘇 is twenty-two.
The tradition also predates simplification, so it counts traditional forms. 张 is scored as 張 — eleven, not seven. Enter whichever you use; the conversion happens before the counting and is shown in the working.
Because a wrong stroke count changes every grid rather than nudging a score, this calculator will not guess. A character it does not hold is named, and that name is left unranked instead of being quietly given a plausible number.
The five grids
- Heaven (天格)
- The surname plus one. Inherited rather than chosen, which is why it counts for least here and for as much as everything else on most sites.
- Personality (人格)
- Last character of the surname plus first of the given name. The core of the reading, and the middle years.
- Earth (地格)
- The given name. The first half of life, up to about thirty.
- Outer (外格)
- How the world outside the family meets you.
- Total (総格)
- Every stroke in the name. The whole life, and the later years in particular.
The Outer grid is computed here as Heaven plus Earth minus Personality, rather than the shortcut most sites use. The shortcut is right for a single-character surname with a two-character given name and wrong for a one-and-one name, where it returns 1 and the tradition says 2.
The Three Talents matter more than any one number
Heaven, Personality and Earth each reduce to an element by their last digit. The 三才 reading asks whether energy runs down that trio or fights itself: a productive link feeds the next position, a controlling link obstructs it. Two controlling links is the most serious fault a name can carry in this tradition — worse than a single inauspicious grid.
Most calculators look this up in a memorised table of a hundred and twenty-five rows and tell you the verdict. This one derives it from the two relations, so the result comes with the reason attached and you can disagree with it.
Where the schools disagree
The eighty-one numbers are not a settled list. Numbers 26, 27, 30, 38 and 55 are graded differently depending on which lineage you read — 26 is a disaster in some schools and the hero's difficult road in others. Where they disagree, this page takes the middle grade rather than the flattering one, and marks it Mixed (半吉) rather than pretending to a certainty the tradition does not have.