Chinese Name to Pinyin

A Chinese name written in the Latin alphabet is not a translation — it is a romanization. The official system for Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin, and it is what you use on a passport, a visa application, an airline ticket, a bank form, and an English-language resume.

This tool takes a name in Chinese characters and returns the pinyin in the three forms people actually need: with tone marks for learning the pronunciation, in Western order for everyday use abroad, and in uppercase for official documents. Everything runs in your browser, so the name you type is never sent to a server.

Each character is one syllable. A full name usually has two or three characters: a one-character surname followed by a one- or two-character given name. 张伟明 is Zhāng Wěimíng — three characters, three syllables.

Pinyin marks tone with a diacritic over the main vowel. Mandarin has four tones plus a neutral tone, and the same syllable can mean different things depending on the tone. That is why the tone marks matter: they are not decoration, they are part of the spelling.

Many Chinese characters have more than one reading. In a name, the surname almost always decides which one is correct. 曾 is read Zēng as a surname but Céng in the everyday word 曾经 (céngjīng, "once"). 单 is Shàn as a surname but dān in 单独 (dāndú, "alone"). A converter that ignores this will get common names wrong.

This tool applies surname readings first, then converts the given name normally. The difference is easy to hear: 单田芳 is Shàn Tiánfāng, not Dān Tiánfāng. Compound surnames such as 欧阳, 司马 and 尉迟 are kept together as one unit.