Update
Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD REFERENCE (www.oxfordreference.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2023. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single entry from a reference work in OR for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 15 November 2024

Chinese Family Names 

Source:
Dictionary of American Family Names
Author(s):
Mark LewellenMark Lewellen, Horace ChenHorace Chen

The exact number of Chinese surnames is unknown, but estimates range from 4,000 to 8,000, and more than 6,000 is a widely accepted figure. Perhaps only 2,000 of those surnames are in use today, however, and most of those occur rarely, so that a majority of the Chinese people share a remarkably small set of surnames. It is sometimes claimed that Chinese has only 100 (or 500) surnames, but this is a misconception that stems in part from a well-known list whose title is usually translated as “The Hundred Surnames”, and more accurately rendered as “The Many Surnames”, since the list contains roughly 500 names.... ...

Access to the complete content on Oxford Reference requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.