We maintain the world's largest Chinese-English bilingual bidirectional databases of proper nouns. These are used by some of the world's major IT companies for a wide variety of applications, such as:

• machine translation (MT)
• information retrieval (IR)
• morphological analysis (MA)
• electronic dictionaries (ED)
• input method editors (IME)
• named entity recognition (NER)

See also our Database of Chinese and non-Chinese Place Names, a subset of the data described on this page. Also, please see our Comprehensive Database of Chinese Name Variants, which contains hundreds of thousands of name variants.

Our comprehensive database of proper nouns in Chinese currently has about one million Simplified Chinese and one million Traditional Chinese headwords. This includes:

1. Chinese personal names
2. Non-Chinese personal names
3. Chinese place names
4. Non-Chinese place names
5. Companies and organizations
6. Publications and literary works
7. Names of famous people
8. Miscellaneous proper nouns

These include various attributes such as readings in pinyin, zhuyin fuhao, Cantonese and several romanization systems, semantic classification codes and frequency rankings, locale codes, and other useful information such as frequency statistics, described in chinfreq.htm. Many fields, such as frequency and English equivalents, are not shown here. Please contact Jack Halpern () for details and larger samples.

The data covers both Chinese and non-Chinese names. For information on Japanese names written in Chinese, see SC Japanese Proper Nouns. For information on the CJKI comprehensive database covering general vocabulary, see chinword.htm.

The data in any desired format, such as plain text files with fields delimited by tabs, Excel, Access, html, etc. in any encoding, such as UTF-8, UCS-2, EUC, GB-2312 and Big Five (the sample below is encoded in UTF-8).

　The prefix "N" stands for "Name"

Semantic classification code such "S" for surname, "G" for given name and "P" for place name. For details, click here.

Name in Simplified Chinese

Name in Traditional Chinese

Name in English (not shown in sample)

Pinyin plus tone with hyphen separating syllables

Country code for origin of name (not shown here):