Like English names, Chinese names carry parents’wishes towards their children. Parents wish thier children to be successful, to be wealthy, to be honest person, to be handsome or beautiful, to be lucky or to be gentle. For example, “chang（昌）”is commonly used in China, it means prosperous.
Traditionally, parents ask those scholars, fortune tellers or fengshui masters to give chinese name to their children. Many fortune tellers or fengshui masters are well versed in traditional five elements-metal, wood, water, fire and earth. Based on a child’s birth date, these fortune tellers will be able to tell that the child may lack certain element and will use the name as an opportunity to make up this/these missing element. For example, if one child is found to lack “water”based on his birthday. The name he is going to have usually will carry the water element, for example, tao（涛）.
Nowadays, many modern parents ignore these traditional five element because of the trouble and money involved. In some cases, they will need to pay a few hundred dollars if they want to hire a fortune teller to name their child.
Most parents still emphasize on auspicious and name with a good meaning. Name like “rui（瑞）”, “jun（俊）” are popular for boy as they means lucky and handsome respectively. Name like hui（惠）, xiu（秀）, fang（芳）are popular among parents with baby girls as they means kind, intelligent and fragrance respectively.
Some parents also worry that their children may not be able to write the chinese character, as a result, they choose name with fewer number of strokes so that it is easy for children to write. According to babyment.com, the number of strokes of chinese name vary from 3 to 19. Traditionally, the number of strokes for each character can be even more.
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