In selecting Chinese baby names, most parents base their child’s name on one of four criteria: meaning, special significance, family connection, and/or sound. Furthermore, Chinese parents must consider the Chinese characters that comprise the name.

The majority of Chinese names are composed of three characters. The first character is the surname, and the last two are the given names. There are some exceptions to this general rule: some family names consist of two characters, and sometimes the given name consists of only one character.

The number of strokes required to draw a Chinese character can be used to categorise it. For example, the character has one stroke, but the character has thirteen strokes. By the way, both of these characters are pronounced yi. The number of strokes determines whether a character is yin (even number of strokes) or yang (odd number of strokes) (odd number of strokes). A balance of yin and yang should be present in Chinese names.