About the Mingzi Tool
The MingZi Tool uses a corpus of Chinese names to guess the following information about a romanized Chinese name (i.e., a Chinese personal name written using English letters):
- Chinese characters for that name
- Which part of the name is the surname (family name)
- Chance that the name bearer is male vs. female
- Romanization system used to transliterate the name
- Regional origin of the name (Mainland China, Taiwan, HK)
- Whether the name is Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese
The MingZi tool was created by Rebecca L. Starr (Li Xingxing, use MingZi to find the characters!)
Version History
- 08/07/11: Version 2.0: Live on mingzitool.com, gender-specific results implemented.
- 08/06/11: Version 1.3: Surname guessing implemented.
- 08/05/11: Version 1.2. Wade-Giles implemented.
- 08/05/11: Version 1.1. Pinyin, Jyutping, Yale, and Other Cantonese is up. Traditional chars also up.
- 08/05/11: Version 1.0. Pinyin conversion only.