tips How to Find Acronyms for Chinese Pinyin Domain Names

Recently, a member on NamePros asked me to help him find the acronyms for some Chinese city names: Qiqihaer, Shenyang, Nanjing, Chengdu, Changchun, Wuhan, and Xi'an. He tried to use Google, but he could not find them.

In Chinese, it's a straightforward process because we can find the corresponding acronym by pronouncing the Pinyin name. That's what I do when I help members find an acronym. Then it occurred to me, wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone could find Chinese acronyms without knowing even a single Chinese word?

Yabla Chinese is a Chinese English Dictionary with Pinyin and Strokes. Not only can it handle city names, but it can also handle general Chinese Pinyin names.

Here's how:

Let's use "Qiqihaer" as an example. Enter Qiqihaer into Yabla's search box. The results will show four pieces of information: Chinese characters written in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Pinyin words, and a short description (shown below).


In this example:

1. Simplified Chinese: 齐齐哈尔
2. Traditional Chinese: Trad. 齊齊哈爾
3. Pinyin words: Qí qí hā ěr
4. Short description: Qiqihar prefecture level city in Heilongjiang province 黑龍江|黑龙江[Hēi lóng jiāng] in northeast China

The results that we want are the Pinyin words: Qí, qí, hā, and ěr. For our purposes, we can ignore the tone marks and view them as standard a-z letters. Now, we use the first character from each of the Pinyin words: Q, Q, H, and E.

So, the acronym for Qiqihaer is QQHE. And that's it! Repeat this procedure to find the results for the other city names mentioned above.

There are a couple caveats:

• These acronyms are purely based on Pinyin spelling, and Pinyin is not the only way to obtain the abbreviation of a Chinese city name. In some cases, they may be different from those created for government administrative purposes.
  • For example, the acronym for Hainan is HN based on Pinyin but HI based on the Chinese national standards.
  • Another example is Hong Kong. Using Pinyin, Hong Kong is Xiang Gang, so its acronym is XG. However, HK is more commonly used to refer to Hong Kong.
• This exercise is based on Simplified Chinese used in mainland China. If you are targeting other Chinese markets such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, or Singapore, be aware of the differences in those languages.

Do you know of other ways to create acronyms? Please share with us. Also, follow me and learn more about Chinese domain names.



This blog post was inspired by @Landov. Special thanks go to the NamePros editing team for their great support.