English Names in Pinyin

Find English names that can be read in Chinese pinyin. This may help those who want to pick a English name that is close to their Chinese ones.

For example, the English name Luke can be spelled in Chinese pinyin Lu Ke.

Data Source

Data files are in input_files folder.

• NationalNames.csv is part of the US baby names dataset.
  • It contains all registered baby names from 1880 to 2014 in United States, ordered by year.
  • Obtained from Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/kaggle/us-baby-names/version/2
• pinyin.txt contains all possible Chinese pinyin combinations, without intonation.
  • It is created from Chinese character & pinyin dataset pinyin_dictionary.txt, which is obtained from https://github.com/mozillazg/pinyin-data

Start Searching

Run the script search_name.py will give you a table of English names that is valid in Chinese pinyin, along with some other information:

name	n_syllable	cnt
Mia	2	144315
Luke	2	137094
Anna	2	118826
Natalie	3	134998

• n_syllable tells you how many Chinese characters can be interpreted from this name. Usually Chinese given names only have 2 syllables. English names may have 3 or 4.
• cnt is the number this name has been used in the given period. It tells the popularity of the name. In this case there are 144k babies named Mia during year 2000-2014.

The search result is saved in pinyin_names.csv.

To customize the name dataset you want to use, run names_cleanup.py separately and change the year you want to include.