Taiwanese Name Generator

Taiwanese names look different from mainland Chinese names on the page even when the characters are the same. Taiwan never adopted Hanyu Pinyin for personal names, so passports and business cards use Wade-Giles-style spellings with a hyphen between the two given-name syllables: Chen Yi-chun, Lin Chia-hao, Tsai Ing-wen. That is why you see Hsu instead of Xu, Chang instead of Zhang, Tsai instead of Cai and Kuo instead of Guo. Traditional characters are standard, and the surname always comes first.

Around ten surnames cover half the island: Chen (陳), Lin (林), Huang (黃), Chang (張), Lee (李), Wang (王), Wu (吳), Liu (劉), Tsai (蔡) and Yang (楊), with Hsu, Cheng, Hsieh, Kuo, Hung, Chiu and Tseng close behind. Given names date their owners clearly. Chin-shui, A-hui and Hsiu-lan belong to grandparents; Chih-ming, Shu-fen and Mei-ling to the 1960s and 70s; Yi-chun, Chia-hao and Ya-ting to the 80s and 90s; and Cheng-en, Pin-yu and Yung-ching to children born after 2010.

The list also covers the other ways a Taiwanese person is named in daily life: an English first name with a romanised surname (Vivian Chen, Kevin Lin) used at work and school, Taiwanese Hokkien spellings of older names (Tân Bûn-hiông), and indigenous Amis, Atayal and Bunun names that follow a given-name-plus-parent's-name pattern rather than a Chinese surname.