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Chinese names are personal names used by individuals from Greater China and other parts of the Sinophone world. Sometimes the same set of Chinese characters could be chosen as a Chinese name, a Hong Kong name, a Japanese name, a Korean name, a Malaysian Chinese name, or a Vietnamese name, but they would be spelled differently due to their varying historical pronunciation of Chinese characters.
Modern Han Chinese consists of about 412 syllables [1] in 5 tones, so homophones abound and most non-Han words have multiple possible transcriptions. This is particularly true since Chinese is written as monosyllabic logograms, and consonant clusters foreign to Chinese must be broken into their constituent sounds (or omitted), despite being thought of as a single unit in their original language.
Among American-born and other overseas Chinese it is common practice to be referred to primarily by one's non-Chinese name, with the Chinese one relegated to alternate or middle name status. Recent immigrants, however, often use their Chinese name as their legal name and adopt a non-Chinese name for casual use only.
Chinese people often address professionals in formal situations by their occupational titles. These titles can either follow the surname (or full name) of the person in reference, or it can stand alone either as a form of address or if the person being referred to is unambiguous without the added surname.
The name is thought to derive from the Chinese word for silk, 丝; 絲; sī; Middle Chinese sɨ, Old Chinese *slɯ, per Zhengzhang). It is itself at the origin of the Latin for 'silk', sērica . This may be a back formation from sērikos ( σηρικός ), 'made of silk', from sēr ( σήρ ), 'silkworm', in which case Sēres is 'the land ...
Ng (pronounced []; English approximation often / ə ŋ / əng or / ɪ ŋ / ing or / ɛ ŋ / eng) is both a Cantonese transliteration of the Chinese surnames 吳/吴 (Mandarin Wú) and 伍 (Mandarin Wǔ) and also a common Hokkien transcription of the surname 黃/黄 (Pe̍h-ōe-jī: N̂ɡ, Mandarin Huáng).
"Teo" and "Chong" are amongst the most common surnames among Chinese Singaporeans, listed at 11th and 19th respectively; [11] "Chang" is the 6th-most-common surname among Chinese Americans; and "Zhang" was the 7th-most-common particularly Chinese surname found in a 2010 survey of Ontario's Registered Persons Database of Canadian health card ...
It is also related far back in Chinese history with the name "Zhou (周)" and "Ji (姬)". The Vietnamese equivalent of the surname is Ngô. Several other, less common Chinese surnames are also transliterated into English as "Wu", but with different tones: 武 Wǔ, 伍 Wǔ, 仵 Wǔ, 烏 Wū (also Wù), 鄔 Wū and 巫 Wū.